


COPYRIGHT DEPOSITS 



















































































.Dss 


Copyright, 1931, 

By William Atherton Du Puy 

3 a i 



Printed in U. S. A. 


FEB -5 193! 

©CU 33551 


CONTENTS 


I. The Potato Has Poisonous Rela¬ 
tives . 2 

II. Cotton Once Grew on Trees .... 4 

III. Trees May Be Poisoned . 6 

IV. Some Plant Relatives. 8 

V. Animals Help Plants . 10 

VI. Giant Grasses. 12 

VII. The Morning-Glory and the Ant 14 

VIII. Leaves Are Sugar Factories .... 16 

IX. Watermelons Are Gourds . 18 

X. The Indians Gave Us Rubber .. 20 

XI. Bananas Have No Seeds. 22 

XII. Plants Eat Sugar . 24 

XIII. Buds Are Understudies . 26 

XIV. Roots Are Pumps . 28 

XV. European Grapes Die in the East 30 

XVI. Cactus Water Barrels. 32 

XVII. The Origin of Seedless Oranges 34 

XVIII. Beans Originated in the Tropics 36 

XIX. The Sunflower Cousins. 38 

XX. The Acorn Trade-Mark. 40 

XXI. Elm-Tree Bouquets . 42 

XXII. The Earth’s Biggest Fruit - 44 

XXIII. The Oak Tree Comes to Town .. 46 

iii 

















CONTENTS 


XXIV. An Unsolved Orchard Mystery . 48 

XXV. A Lily That We Eat. 50 

XXVI. Chaparral Is a Plague. 52 

XXVII. The Cabbage Cousins . 54 

XXVIII. The Turnip Cultivates Itself .. 56 

XXIX. Dates and Their Native Home .. 58 

XXX. Sentinels of the Desert . 60 

XXXI. The Pine Family Is Old. 62 

XXXII. The Beginning of Rubber. 64 

XXXIII. Lettuce Is Related to the Sun¬ 
flower . 66 

XXXIV. Wheat Is a Grass. 68 

XXXV. The Banana Plant Is All Leaves 70 

XXXVI. Tapping Rubber Trees. 72 

XXXVII. Thorns That Are Leaves . 74 

XXXVIII. Fungi Are the Clean-Up Squad . 76 

XXXIX. The Wax Berry Is a Poison Sign 78 

XL. Franco-American Grapevines ... 80 

XLI. The Barberry Bush Is an Outlaw 82 

XLII. Evergreens Are Built For Fight¬ 
ing Storms . 84 

XLIII. The Outcast Fungi . 86 

XLIV. Bananas Are Picked Green. 88 

XLV. Trees Invented Airplanes. 90 

XLVI. Apple Trees Go Crazy. 92 

XLVII. The Fruits of Palms . 94 

XLVIII. The Easter Lily’s Desert Cousin 96 

XLIX. The Stepmother Tree. 98 

L. Do Chollas Jump? . 100 


IV 




















CONTENTS 


LI. Date Groves . 102 

LII. Fire Insurance for Trees . 104 

LIII. The Lion’s Tooth. 106 

LIV. The Corn Silk’s Purpose. 108 

LV. The Rose of Jericho. 110 

LVI. Plants That Bury Nuts. 112 

LVII. Orchards With Two Climates .. 114 

LVIII. Fungi Have No Flowers. 116 

LIX. Plants That Live on Other 

Plants . 118 

LX. The Cure For Ivy Poisoning- 120 

LXI. The Morning-Glory Family- 122 

LXII. Nut Camouflage . 124 

LXIII. Watermelons from Africa. 126 

LXIV. Oaks Trained to Produce Cork .. 128 

LXV. Spoon-Fed Chrysanthemums ... 130 

LXVI. Stumps That Grow . 132 

LXVII. Lazy Trees . 134 

LXVIII. Cherry Trees For Shade. 136 

LXIX. Cheese From Beans. 138 

LXX. A Stubborn Canadian Enemy .... 140 

LXXI. Daisy Flowers Have Learned to 

Cooperate . 142 

LXXII. The Knot Hole’s Story . 144 

LXXIII. Trees That Are Dwarfs. 146 

LXXIV. No Sugar for Shakespeare. 148 

LXXV. Robbing Persimmons of Pucker . 150 

LXXVI. Plants That Prey. 152 

LXXVII. Palms Build Chimneys. 154 


v 






















CONTENTS 


LXXVIII. Apples Have Traveled Far. 156 

LXXIX. The Maple Family . 158 

LXXX. Man Spreads Weeds . 160 

LXXXI. Cactus for Cows . 162 

LXXXII. Nature’s Idea of Cotton. 164 

LXXXIII. Tiny Plants Manufacture Fer¬ 
tilizer . 166 

LXXXIV. Where Did Corn Come From? .. 168 

LXXXV. Inventing New Fruits. 170 

LXXXVI. A Neglected Plant. 172 

LXXXVII. Sunflower Travels . 174 

LXXXVIII. Coaxing the Sugar Beet. 176 

LXXXIX. Celery Is a Built-Up Plant .... 178 

XC. Plants That Wigwag . 180 

XCI. Leaves Are Tree Ash Cans. 182 

XCII. Oaks Like to Be Different. 184 

XCIII. Tree Roots Are Water-Hunters 186 

XCIV. The Cactus Houses Woodpeckers 188 

XCV. Bananas Are Newcomers . 190 


vi 
















INTRODUCTION 


O NE may sit with a book in his hand that is ad¬ 
mittedly full of charm, fascination, romance, and 
yet be unable to get any pleasure at all out of it because, 
forsooth, it is written in French and he reads only English. 

In the same way the Book of Nature may be open be¬ 
fore him through all the days of his life, but not having 
the key to it, he will be unable to dip into its mysteries 
or to appreciate its miracles. 

The world of living things is so large and so compli¬ 
cated that it is hard for the undirected observer to as¬ 
semble any degree of order from its chaos. It is as though 
all the books in the Congressional Library were thrown 
together in an unorganized pile. The casual student 
would be discouraged in attempting to find what he 
wanted in the mass. 

But an understanding of nature can be organized just 
as these books can be classified and assigned to their 
proper shelves. When information is properly grouped, 
understanding begins to dawn and puzzling situations 
clear up like fog before the sun. 

In nature, for example, there are animate and inani¬ 
mate objects — those that are alive and those that are 
not. There is, for example, a bird on a twig or a stone in 
vii 


INTRODUCTION 


the road. Certain principles apply to things having life 
that make them different from things which do not have 
life. We may illustrate by saying that the one grows and 
changes while the other does not. We can establish group 
principles that apply to all individuals of the one sort or 
the other. 

Those things that are alive again divide themselves 
and make it possible for one to study smaller groups and 
learn principles that apply to them. In the living world 
there is the animal kingdom, which is made up of indi¬ 
viduals that can move about as can a jack rabbit, and the 
vegetable kingdom, into which are placed those that stay 
all the time in the same place as does a barberry bush. 
The members of one group, we may observe, have the 
power of choosing for themselves what they will do, while 
the members of the other group must get along wherever 
chance happens to place them. 

Not to follow these steps in classification too closely, we 
come, finally, perhaps, to an examination of certain fami¬ 
lies in the animal world. There is the sparrow family 
of birds, for example. Everybody knows the English 
sparrow. The song sparrow and the field sparrow are 
enough like it to be put at once into the same family. 
One might not think of the canary as a sparrow until he 
began to study its structural make-up and its habits, but 
if he should do so its family connection would be revealed. 
The snowbird of the winter is a sparrow. So is the purple 
finch and the curious crossbill that lives upon the seeds 
viii 


INTRODUCTION 


hidden in pine cones. So, in fact, is the radiant cardinal 
that hides through the winter among the thick branches 
of the cedar tree. 

All these birds have the short, stout, cone-shaped bills 
of the seed-eaters, that often crack a grain of corn. All 
have nine large feathers in each wing, which is the scien¬ 
tific trade-mark of the family. Fundamentally all these 
birds are alike. By grouping them, a knowledge of one 
becomes a knowledge of all. 

Likewise in the vegetable kingdom may the members 
be divided into families. Such a family is that of the 
gourds. It is a revelation to find that the watermelon, the 
cucumber, the cantaloupe, the pumpkin are gourds. The 
vines on which all these gourds grow sprawl on the ground 
and are almost identical. Weak and spindling as they 
are, they grow bigger fruit than any other plant in the 
world. Study the habits of one of them and you will 
know them all. The secrets of the group are revealed by 
the single individual. 

Thus, when the manner in which plants divide them¬ 
selves into families is understood, it becomes not so diffi¬ 
cult for one to study a number of individuals, fit them 
into their families, and have something of an understand¬ 
ing of the whole. 

This matter of plant families is fascinating. One is 
greatly surprised, when he is presented to the bean family, 
to find that the pod of the clover of the fields entitles it 
to admission into this group. The towering locust tree 


IX 


INTRODUCTION 


is a cousin to this clover. It, too, has a bean. Come to 
think of it, it has leaves like the clover with leaflets oppo¬ 
site each other on a stem. Wisteria is a bean as is the 
peanut. Wherever one goes around the world and finds 
a plant with a bean hanging on it, he may forthwith know 
that it has certain traits that are common to those mem¬ 
bers of the family that he has known at home. 

One would hardly suspect a relationship between the 
morning glory and the sweet potato; yet their vines are 
almost exactly alike. Every tree in the world that grows 
an acorn, whatever its appearance, is an oak. When you 
learn that lawn grass grows from the inside, has joints, 
has blades instead of leaves, and tassels instead of flowers, 
you know the secrets of wheat, rice, corn, sugar cane, 
bamboo, for all these are in the grass family. Study the 
dandelion on the same lawn and you will know much of 
daisies, sunflowers, thistles, chrysanthemums, asters, gold- 
enrods, and all those flowers that bind their seeds to¬ 
gether in clusters. Study the bulb plants and learn that 
lilies sit around the family table with onions, garlic, the 
stately yucca of the desert, and the odorous tuberose of 
the Orient. 

So upon a little investigation does the chaos of nature 
begin to organize itself and become understandable. 
With the advent of understanding interest grows. When 
one sees a potted palm plant in a hotel lobby, he soon 
begins to call to mind one cousin that produces cocoanuts 
on the coral isles of the Pacific and another which grows 


x 


INTRODUCTION 


dates in the oases of Africa. He knows how they are 
alike and how different. He sees a rosebush in bloom and 
knows that it makes an apple, quite skimpy as to meat, 
just as does its cousin that supplies the market. 

The purpose of this little book is to give a few peeps 
into this mysterious vegetable world with the hope that 
it may reveal a degree of the interest that is hidden there 
and lead the reader to a further investigation. 

William Atherton Du Puy 


XI 























WONDERS OF THE PLANT WORLD 




I 


THE POTATO HAS POISONOUS RELATIVES 


I SN’T IT ODD that the po¬ 
tato, which yields so much 
food for man, is a prominent 
member of a family of poison 
plants! 



i 


The potato is a member of 
the nightshade family. At 
the head of that family 


stands the deadly nightshade, a bushy plant well known 
in England. It bears cherry-like berries that have caused 
English mothers much trouble, for children are likely to 
gather and eat them. 

When Europeans came to America, they found a num¬ 
ber of plants which were promptly and properly set down 
as nightshades, but which did not exist on the other side 
of the ocean. 

One of these was tobacco. The formation of its leaves, 
flowers, and seeds set it down as a nightshade. The poi¬ 
son of this nightshade produced certain effects which had 
led to its use by the Indians for a purpose then unknown 
in Europe. The practice of smoking grew out of these 
nightshade qualities. Tobacco has since become one of 
the most widely used plant products. 

Then there is the tomato. It, too, is a nightshade. Its 
fruit was long believed to be poisonous. It was known 
as the love apple. It first came to be cultivated in gar- 


2 


THE POTATO HAS POISONOUS RELATIVES 

dens as an ornamental plant. It was not until the middle 
of the last century that it was eaten to any considerable 
extent. Now it ranks third among vegetables in the num¬ 
ber grown and eaten. The pepper is another nightshade. 
So is the eggplant. So is the Jimson weed. 

But the potato is the greatest of the American mem¬ 
bers of this poison plant family, which has become such 
a large food-producer. The native home of the plant was 
the mountain regions of the Andes. When Spaniards first 
went to Peru, they found the natives cultivating it for the 
tubers that grew on its roots. These tubers were the 
staple food of the Peruvians. 

The Spaniards introduced the potato to Europe. It 
first became popular in Italy. Later Sir Walter Raleigh 
planted potatoes on his estate near Cork, Ireland. The 
crop immediately became popular in that land because 
there were so many people and so little land. Potatoes 
would produce more food to the acre than any other crop. 

Sir Walter also tried to get England to adopt the po¬ 
tato. Queen Elizabeth served it at court at his request. 
But its use was fought because it was a nightshade. The 
fact that potatoes are sometimes called spuds is said to 
have originated from the initials of the Society to Prevent 
Unwholesome Diet. 


3 


II 


COTTON ONCE GREW ON TREES 

I SN'T IT ODD that cotton once grew on trees! 

We are so used to cotton as a field plant that grows 
only a few feet tall and dies in the autumn that we never 
think of it as growing in any other way. As it grew in 
the beginning, however, it was a far different sort of plant. 

Cotton got its start in the tropics. There it knew no 
frosts in the fall of the year and so did not die. It grew 
right along, season after season, and developed into a tree 
about as large as a peach tree. If cotton-picking had been 
popular in those days, as it is now, people would have 
had to go up stepladders to gather the crop. 

When men learned how to use the fiber of the cotton 
tree for making cloth, they began to plant it in their fields. 
They found that they could get better results by planting 
it fresh every year. They found, in fact, that countries 
far enough north to know frosts grew the best cotton 
crops. The southern part of the United States surpassed 
all other regions. Men came to plant those crops year 
by year. They forgot entirely that cotton in its native 
state was a tree growing in warm climates. 

When the United States came to rule over Hawaii, it 
planted cotton there. This cotton did not die out in the 
autumn. Thus attention was called to the almost for¬ 
gotten fact that the cotton plant is naturally a tree. 

Cotton plants were grown to be four or five years old 
in Hawaii and yielded well. Experiments were tried to 
4 


COTTON ONCE GREW ON TREES 

see if the crop would pay better if it was cultivated in 
orchards that lived through the decades. It looked for a 
while as though it would work out that way. Then insect 
pests got among the trees and spoiled them. It was the 
insects, not the nature of the cotton tree, that spoiled this 
scheme for farming the crop. 

The cotton tree as it first grew is still to be found in 
Peru. It is to be found also in Mexico. It was in these 
wild cotton trees of Mexico that the boll weevil lived 
through the centuries and got the habit of raising its 
young in cotton balls. 

When it got into cultivated cotton fields, it found con¬ 
ditions much more favorable to its increase and so swept 
on and on across the cotton states, doing great damage. 


5 


Ill 


TREES MAY BE POISONED 

I SN’T IT ODD that shade trees will not grow in front 
of drug stores! 

Any one who doubts this statement has only to go 
about his own town and observe the facts. There may be 
solid rows of handsome trees up and down a street until 
a drug store is reached. Then there is sure to be a gap 
that is treeless. 

Almost anybody can think back and remember a time 
when he has seen some handsome tree beside the curb 
gradually languish and die. The tree did not appear to 
have been injured. Its body was sound. The insects had 
not attacked its leaves. Come to think of it, this tree 
stood in front of a drug store. As likely as not, the drug¬ 
gist loved and cherished it. But it died. Trees have died 
in front of drug stores everywhere. 

These deaths are due to the fact that drug stores sell 
ice cream. They take place in front of other places where 
ice cream is sold. To be sure, the trees do not eat ice 
cream, and they have no objection to its being eaten by 
human beings. They are quite willing that it should be 
served under their sheltering shade. 

The trouble lies in the fact that ice cream comes packed 
with salt and ice about it. This layer of salt and ice 
keeps the ice cream frozen. As ice cream is used, the salt 
and ice melt. 

The practice of the druggist may be to pour this salty 
6 


TREES MAY BE POISONED 

water into the sink and down the sewer. Sooner or later, 
however, he or one of his clerks will roll one of these 
freezers out to the curb and empty its contents about the 
tree that stands there. He does not know of the harm 
he is doing the tree. He may even think that he is giving 
it a much-needed drink. This does not need to happen 
many times before the tree is killed. 

Ice cream manufacturers also are often to blame for the 
death of trees in front of the stores they serve. The ice 
cream is often delivered from the curb. Freezers packed 
with salt are put off and taken on. The ice cream that 
is being delivered is often repacked at the curb. Salt is 
spilled. It gets about the roots of the trees and kills them. 

Salt is death to most vegetation. There are only a few 
trees that will live in contact with salty water. Salt is 
often used to kill vegetation. If, for instance, one wants 
a plot of bare pebbles in front of a city house where a 
lawn will not succeed, he sprinkles the plot liberally with 
salt. It kills grass, weeds, and all kinds of vegetation that 
are likely to be growing here. But the tragedy comes 
when salt gets on great trees by accident and they are 
lost. 


7 


IV 


SOME PLANT RELATIVES 

I SN’T IT ODD that the apple tree is really a rose bush 
that has learned how to make fruit! 

The seed pod of the rose, as you will see if you examine 
it, is like an apple. 

It is possible, it seems, to trace kinships among plants 
and to show that there are brothers and sisters, first cous¬ 
ins, second cousins, and so on down the line. 

There are the members of the rose family, for example. 
The apples, pears, and quinces are one branch of that 
family. The peaches, plums, and cherries are members 
of another branch. The blackberries, raspberries, and 
dewberries are members of another branch. 

Certain family traits run through all these branches. 
The flowers of all are much alike and form a sort of fam¬ 
ily trade-mark. They are as closely related as second 
cousins. The apple and the cherry, for example, might 
be set down as second cousins. Possibly the strawberry 
and the peach, which certainly do not seem much alike at 
first thought, might be considered as far apart as third 
cousins. 

There are outstanding differences among the apple 
group, the peach group, and the berry group. These are 
chiefly in the way in which they put up their seeds. The 
apples, pears, and quinces put their seeds up in little 
clusters in their cores. The peaches, cherries, and plums 
are stone fruits; that is, they have a single seed enclosed 
8 


SOME PLANT RELATIVES 

in a hard pit at their centers. The raspberries, dewberries, 
and blackberries are made of tiny stone fruits arranged in 
close clusters. 

The members of each of these groups are, of course, 
closer kin to one another than they are to members of 
the other groups. The apple and the pear might be set 
down as first cousins. The peach and the cherry are first 
cousins. The blackberry and the raspberry bear the same 
relationship to each other. 

The next step of relationship might be considered that 
of brother and sister. Take, for example, a group like the 
cherries. In that group are found the sweet cherry trees, 
which grow tall and yield the fruit that is so good to eat 
right out of the box. Then there are the sour cherries. 
They grow on low, bushy trees and are not so good to eat, 
but are better for canning and for pies. The relationship 
between them is much like that of brother and sister. 



9 


V 


ANIMALS HELP PLANTS 

I SN’T IT ODD that the orchard fruits at the two vital 
stages of their lives have to find a way to get help from 
members of the animal kingdom or perish! 

The first of these times at which the fruits must call 
in outside aid is blossoming time. The purpose of the 
flower is to make seed in order that this race of plants may 
go on. If any group of plants failed for a generation in 
seed-making, it would disappear from the earth. So this 
seed-making is very important. 

Most flowers, however, cannot set seed unless they 
get pollen from other flowers to fertilize them. It is for 
this purpose that the flowers call in members of the 
animal world. They ask the insects, the bees principally, 
to carry pollen from one blossom to another. 

Flowers make themselves beautiful to attract the at¬ 
tention of the bees. They give off sweet odors for the 
same purpose. Then each puts a drop of nectar in its 
cup as a bribe to the bee to make it a visit. The bee 
comes, bringing on its fuzzy head pollen it has got in a 
visit to another flower. Some of this pollen drops off 
and fertilizes the flower, and the flower sets seed, thus 
taking the first of two important steps toward growing 
new plants to take its place when it is gone. 

The next important step is getting that seed planted 
when it is ripe. Some plants — for example, the thistle 
— find a way to make their seeds ride the winds to a new 
10 


ANIMALS HELP PLANTS 

home. The oak tree depends on the squirrel to plant its 
acorns. Such trees as the apple and the peach have to 
find a way of their own. 

They fall back on members of the animal world. They 
place around their seeds quantities of juicy meat which 
animals like to eat. All the fruits that are good to eat 
have this meat, with which to repay any animal for carry¬ 
ing their seed away to a new home. 

And note how well many of them have succeeded! 
Most of the orchard fruits grew in the beginning in the 
middle of Asia. They were not very widely scattered. 
The apple made itself attractive to the man animal, how¬ 
ever, and has traveled all around the world with him. 
The peach appealed to his taste and has made similar 
journeys. Blackheart cherries that grow at the foot of 
Mount Shasta, in California, made the journey there all 
the way from Persia because they made themselves good 
for the man animal to eat. 

The whole story of these orchard fruits and their travels 
illustrates the benefits one creature may gain by being 
particularly nice to others around it. 


11 


VI 


GIANT GRASSES 

I SN’T IT ODD that grass in the tropics grows to a 
height of two hundred feet, while here in the North 
we think of it as a modest ground-covering under foot! 

The giant bamboo of India, China, Japan, and other 
parts of the tropics is grass, though one is not likely to 
think of it as such. It grows in groves that compare 
quite favorably in height and density with forests of trees 
anywhere. 

The popular conception of grass as a modest ground 
growth is not a proper one. The grasses taken together 
make up, in the vegetable kingdom, a very important 
group, which, when it is measured, is far from being 
modest in size. 

Wheat is, of course, a grass. It is the great bread grain 
of the Western World and is more important to man than 
any other plant that grows. Rice is a close relative of 
wheat and is equally important in the East. More than 
half the people in the world, in the densely populated 
countries of the Orient, live largely on rice, which is a 
grass grain. 

Corn, which is the most valuable crop grown in the 
United States, seems even less like a grass than does 
wheat. Nevertheless it is one. The sugar cane of Cuba, 
which is so important to the sweet tooth of the American, 
is likewise a grass. Then all are topped by the tropical 
bamboo, which is used in building houses and which 
12 


GIANT GRASSES 


serves most of the purposes of timber and lumber in the 
East. 

There are, of course, certain points in which all these 
plants are alike and which show them to be members of 
the same family. The most important of these common 
family traits is the fact that all have joints. The grasses 
are jointed plants. Bamboo, corn, lawn grass — all have 
joints. The possession of joints is the family mark of the 
grasses. 

All grasses have the same type of leaves. Because of 
their shape they are called blades. These plants are also 
alike in the sort of flowers they bear. Their flowers are 
not bright-colored. They have no odor. The grasses do 
not need bees to help fertilize their flowers that they may 
bear seeds. They are fertilized with the help of the wind. 
So they do not need to use odors or bright colors to attract 
the insects. 


13 


VII 

THE MORNING-GLORY AND THE ANT 


I SN’T IT ODD that the morning-glory, which seems so 
innocent in its early blooming, really comes out at 
the time of day it does in order to escape enemies that 
might otherwise destroy it! 

The ant tribe is the enemy of the morning-glory. That 
flower has nectar at the bottom of its cup, and ants are 
nectar-eaters. If the morning-glory were to bloom at 
noon, the ants would scramble into its blossom and gobble 
up this nectar. In the early hours, however, when the 
dew is on the grass, the ants are not at work in the open. 
So the morning-glory does its blooming then and puts up 
its shutters by the time its enemy is abroad. 

The morning-glory keeps its nectar for its invited 
guests, the bees. It wants them to come visiting, for they 
are helpful to it. As a matter of fact, its very life depends 
on their calls. 

The fuzzy head of the bee gets all covered with pollen 
as it goes from one morning-glory cup to another for its 
nectar. It carries some of this pollen from one flower to 
another and shakes it off. This fertilizes each flower, and 
the flower makes seed. It could not do so if the pollen 
were not carried from one flower to the other. 

The ant, on the contrary, has no fuzzy head. It can¬ 
not carry pollen from flower to flower as the flying insects 
do. All it wants is to get its bag full of honey and go back 
home. Knowing this, the morning-glory opens its bloom 

14 


THE MORNING-GLORY AND THE ANT 

when its friends are abroad and unwelcome visitors who 
can render it no service are still asleep. 

There are other flowers that use this same principle in 
a different way. These are the night-blooming flowers. 
They come out when it is dark because the wingless in¬ 
sects are not then abroad to steal nectar. Neither are 
the bees abroad to carry pollen, for that matter. These 
night bloomers, however, do not depend on bees to bring 
them pollen, but on certain night moths. The night¬ 
blooming cereus is such a flower. Most of these night 
bloomers have very strong and sweet odors. This is given 
out to let the moths know that supper is being served. 
They come, are fed, and cause the plant to bear seeds. 



15 



ym 

LEAVES ARE SUGAR FACTORIES 


I SN’T IT ODD that every green leaf in the world, sit¬ 
ting out in the sunshine, is found, when its work is 
understood, to be a sugar factory! 

Food, of course, is as important to the growth of plants 
as it is to that of animals. Plants starve if they do not 
get it. It takes a considerable amount of food to build a 
great forest or a field full of corn. 

When search is made to find out where that food comes 
from, it is found that some of the raw materials of it are 
sucked up by the roots from the ground and others are 
taken from the air. But they are put together in the 
proper preparation of plant food by green leaves in the 
sunshine. 

This food is chiefly sugar. The leaves make it out of 
two materials that are ready at hand. The first of these 
materials is water. So, to begin with, plants must have 
water if they are to grow. The roots draw water from the 
ground and take it up to the leaves. Water, as every¬ 
body knows, is made of two elements, hydrogen and 
oxygen. 

Sugar, the chemist will tell you, is made of three ele¬ 
ments: hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. The leaf, in order 
to manufacture sugar, has only to find carbon, since it 
already has hydrogen and oxygen in the form of water. 

When animals breathe, they give off carbon dioxide. 
When coal burns, the carbon of which it is made unites 
16 


X 


LEAVES ARE SUGAR FACTORIES 

with the oxygen of the air and makes carbon dioxide. 
Thus, there is always carbon dioxide in the air. To be 
sure, it is there in very small quantities — one part to 
three thousand of other elements. 

The leaf is so made that it can strain this carbon diox¬ 
ide out of the air. Having got it, the leaf still has an¬ 
other difficult thing to do. The carbon dioxide must be 
broken up. This is a hard task for the chemist working 
in his laboratory, but the leaf does it quite easily. 

The substance in the leaf that makes it green has much 
to do with this. This green breaks up the sun’s rays and 
applies some of the energy that is in them to tearing the 
carbon and the oxygen of the carbon dioxide apart. 

When it has done this, it unites the carbon with hydro¬ 
gen and oxygen from the water that it has already brought 
up from the roots, and the result is sugar. It has some 
oxygen left over, which it puts back into the air, thereby 
making the air better for animals to breathe. But from 
the sugar that it gets, it makes most of the food which 
the plant needs for growth. 


17 


IX 


WATERMELONS ARE GOURDS 

I SN’T IT ODD that the watermelon, as you will see if 
you study its family, is a gourd! 

It may be even harder at first to think of the cucumber 
as a gourd. It is not so difficult in the case of the canta¬ 
loupe, for this is hollow on the inside and has its seeds 
clustered there, just as the ordinary gourd has. The 
pumpkin and the squash, come to think of it, are built 
very much on the gourd plan. 

As a matter of fact, all these are cousins in the gourd 
family. Even the cucumber and the watermelon, which 
are not hollow inside, have outside shells and seeds hid¬ 
den away inside. These two fruits, in fact, are built on 
patterns that are alike. 

If one happened to think that these plants might be 
kin to each other and began to study them, he would soon 
find plenty of proof that they are. He would find, for 
example, that all grow on trailing vines that spread out 
upon the ground. All those vines are much alike. All 
have broad leaves that spread their faces to the sun for 
purposes of sugar-making. These leaves are likely to be 
hairy and unpleasant to the touch. 

The gourd itself is less like many of its cousins than 
they are like each other. Some gourd vines run along the 
ground, but others climb trees. Most of the gourds are 
children of the tropics, but many of them have been 
brought to northern gardens and grown there. 

18 


WATERMELONS ARE GOURDS 

There is one gourd which has a spongy inside that the 
housewife often uses for a dishrag. In early days gourds 
were widely used for dippers and as household vessels of 
many other sorts. There are slim gourds, sometimes a 
yard long, which were at one time very useful. People cut 
their necks off, fitted them with stoppers, and used them 
as bottles. Calabash gourds have heavy walls an inch 
thick and are so big that they may be used as wash tubs. 


19 


X 


THE INDIANS GAVE US RUBBER 

I SN’T IT ODD that the 
balloon tires on modern 
automobiles are made from 
the same material as the 
bouncing balls of the Indians, 
which puzzled and mystified 
the Spaniards when they first 
came to America! 

The Spaniards were puzzled for the reason that no Eu¬ 
ropean at that time had ever seen rubber. The natives 
all through the American tropics were using it, but people 
on the other side of the Atlantic did not know about it. 
The Mexicans were putting it on their coats to make 
them shed the rain. The natives along the Amazon were 
making shoes and bottles out of it. 

Early explorers carried this material, of which bounc¬ 
ing balls were made, back to Europe. It was two hundred 
years later that an Englishman found out that lead-pen¬ 
cil marks could be erased with it. It was put on the ends 
of pencils. Because of this use it came to be called rub¬ 
ber. It was three hundred years after it was found in 
Mexico that Britons began to put rubber on their coats 
to make them shed the rain. The man who did it 
first was named Macintosh, and one type of raincoat is 
called a mackintosh to this’day. Rubber is now used, 
as you know, in the manufacture of the tires that* 
20 




THE INDIANS GAVE US RUBBER 

make our modem automobiles so comfortable to 
ride in. 

Rubber is made from the juice of a tree. There were 
trees growing in Africa and Asia from the juice of which 
it might have been made, but nobody had hit upon the 
idea. There were a number of trees in America from 
which rubber might be made, and many of them were 
being used for the purpose. 

The best of these trees was called the Hevea. It grew 
all through the Amazon valley. As people all about the 
world came to know about rubber and slowly find uses for 
it, a demand grew up, and the natives of the tropic Ameri¬ 
cas went more and more into the forests and came back 
with this tree gum. 

They cut gashes in these trees and caught the juice as 
it came out. This juice looked much like milk. They 
carried it to their camps. There a smoky fire was lighted. 
A broad paddle was dipped into the rubber milk; some of 
the milk stuck to the paddle. The paddle was then held 
in the smoke and turned about. The milk hardened. The 
paddle was again put into the milk and then into the 
smoke, and another layer hardened. In the end, a large 
piece of rubber grew on the paddle. It was cut loose and 
was ready for market. 

This was called wild rubber. It was not so good as that 
which is made by scientific methods since rubber has be¬ 
come a product of cultivated trees on plantations. This 
latter is called plantation rubber. In this generation it 
has come to dominate the rubber market. 


21 


XI 


BANANAS HAVE NO SEEDS 

I SN’T IT ODD that bananas contain no seeds that will 
grow when they are planted! 

The object of a plant in producing fruit is nearly al¬ 
ways that of putting a seed inside it. The fruit will 
help the seed to get planted. Berries make a fruit that 
birds like. The birds carry the berries away and drop 
the seeds in a new place. The walnut tree grows a nut 
which squirrels like and will bury in the ground to eat 
later on. The forgotten nuts produce new trees. 

But the banana plant, which produces one of the hand¬ 
somest fruits in the world, cannot grow another plant 
from that fruit. So for a long time it was a mystery why 
it went to the trouble to produce a fruit. 

The banana plant does not grow from seed. Sugar cane 
grows from joints that are planted. Potato plants grow 
from eyes on the potatoes that are cut up and put in the 
ground. Banana plants grow from large bulbs, or heads, 
under the ground. The heads also push up, about the 
trunks, small shoots, or suckers. These suckers grow 
to be new trees. By the time the original plant is grown 
the head under the ground will have developed and 
started half a dozen others. 

The grown plant is cut down when its bunch of bananas 
has been harvested. The young plants will be thinned 
out to three or four, and these will be allowed to grow. 
Sometimes they are transplanted. New ones spring up 
22 


BANANAS HAVE NO SEEDS 

from their roots. This may go on for ten to fifteen or 
twenty years from the same planting. 

The banana plant has the habit of growing its young 
ones at its roots in this way. It does not need to produce 
seed to keep its kind going in the world. It has therefore 
stopped producing them. 

The fact that it yields fruit shows, however, that there 
was a time when it needed seeds to replant itself. Ba¬ 
nana plants growing in the wild state yield no fruit. 
They grow in a sort of jungle, as do their cousins, the 
purple cannas that people set out in their gardens. 

But man found out a long time ago that if he set out 
banana plants in rich soil and gave them plenty of room 
they would produce fruit. It has been so long since they 
needed the seed, however, that it has lost its spark of life 
and will not grow. Along the middle of the banana may 
be seen the markings of what were once seeds. 

But man has learned how to take advantage of the fact 
that bananas once grew seeds and has reaped the harvest 
of a splendid fruit eaten by hundreds of millions of 
people. 


23 


XII 


PLANTS EAT SUGAR 

I SN’T IT ODD that the great oak tree standing by the 
roadside is found, upon examination, to have a sweet 
tooth — to be a very large eater of sugar! 

The leaves of the oak tree take carbon from the air, 
combine it with water from the roots, and manufacture 
sugar. This sugar is mixed with practically all the oak 
tree eats and becomes the chief item of its diet. 

Scientists have found that starch and sugar are chemi¬ 
cally very similar. It is easy to change one into the other. 

All plants, starting out with sugar, turn it into starch 
and then back into sugar to suit their purposes. Who¬ 
ever wants to can try a very simple experiment of turning 
starch into sugar. He has only to take a soda cracker, 
which is nearly all starch, and slowly chew it. He will 
notice that the starch in the cracker turns sweet in his 
mouth. It has undergone a chemical action that has 
changed it to sugar. 

The important difference between these two materials 
lies in the fact that sugar dissolves in water and starch 
does not. The plant transports its food supplies by water. 
It sends them through its system as sugar dissolved in 
sap. 

But when these foods have arrived at the point where 
they must be used as building materials, they are changed 
into the starch form. Starch, in fact, is sugar in storage 
form. If a bag of wheat, or a bushel of corn, or a sack 
24 


PLANTS EAT SUGAR 


of potatoes were analyzed, it would be found to be almost 
all starch. The plants that produced these foods from 
sugar manufactured in their leaves have converted them 
into the starch form for storage. 

Various kinds of animals eat grass in the field, corn on 
the cob, jam on their bread. In any of these cases they 
are going back to the sugar that was used by the plants 
from which these products come. Sugar is one of the 
most important food products in the world. Without it 
neither animal nor plant life could exist. 



25 



XIII 


BUDS ARE UNDERSTUDIES 

I SN’T IT ODD that every leaf on the trees has an un¬ 
derstudy ready to take its place when it is gone! 
When a leaf grows out on a twig in the spring, there 
goes along with it the beginning of another leaf or group 
of leaves, wrapped up as a bud that is just beginning. 
All through the summer when the leaf is in its prime, this 
bud is growing and developing. Whoever would like 
to may cut open the little stalk at the leaf base and 
examine it under a microscope. He will find that there 
is in it the form of a tiny leaf or of a twig that is al¬ 
ready taking shape, though it is unbelievably frail and 
delicate. 

In the summer time one sees the abundance of leaves, 
flowers, and fruit that a tree may put forth. This flourish 
of green would seem the one idea that the tree has in 
mind. But back of the flourish is the very definite prepa¬ 
ration that is being made for the season that is a year 
ahead. 

The popular belief that the tree waits until the spring 
to develop its buds is quite wrong. Every bud is in place 
with its whole plan laid out nearly a year ahead. Some 
of these buds may be flowers. If so, every fold is in place, 
in miniature, at the base of its leaf the summer before it 
is to appear. It is more likely that this bud is to develop 
into a twig. Twigs spring from the points where leaves 
were located the year before. It was the presence of the 
26 



BUDS ARE UNDERSTUDIES 

leaf that started the twig. So a leaf may cause some¬ 
thing to grow that is much greater than itself. 

One may visit clumps of trees in the autumn after the 
leaves are gone and wonder what sort of flowers and 
leaves they are to bear in the spring. He may take a 
horse-chestnut bud, for instance, open out its tiny folds, 
and unpack a whole cluster of flowers, each, under the 
microscope, quite correct as to proper horse-chestnut 
form. The bud of a tulip tree may be smaller, but it is 
none the less distinct. If it is opened up, a single flower 
will be revealed. If it is examined with a microscope, 
every detail, even the stamens and pistil, will be found 
in place. A careful examination of an oak bud — one 
that is to be a twig, not a flower —will reveal a whole 
cluster of leaves. Even the form of the twig itself has 
begun to show. 

These buds push out in the autumn after the leaves 
have fallen and make quite a showing for themselves. 
All through the winter they stand out boldly on their 
twigs. The thermometer may go down to a point where 
they are frozen hard as bits of ice. If one of them is 
chipped open, the crystal formation may be seen. It is 
frozen hard. But if it is left on the tree, it is unharmed. 
It awaits the coming of spring, when the flow of sap up 
from the roots will bring to it the materials from which it 
can build the structure that is laid out in the sleeping 
buds. Then each tiny leaf that unfolds will, itself, start 
a bud that is to carry on when it is gone. 


27 


XIV 


ROOTS ARE PUMPS 

I SN’T IT ODD that the roots of trees are able to draw 
water out of the ground as easily as does the pump 
on the back porch! 

The average-sized tree may use as much water every 
day as the average-sized family. The roots supply it. 
They often perform a task which is different from that 
of the pump, for they get this water from regions where 
there seems to be none. They, unlike the pump, do not 
need to reach down into some stream flow. They can 
get their barrels of water from ordinary soil, where it 
exists only in the form of dampness. 

The root, working underground as it does, is a rather 
remarkable instrument. In the first place, it must drive 
itself deeply into the earth. It has a thimble on the end 
which helps it do this. Having driven itself into the 
ground, it proceeds to grow, pushing outward with great 
force as it does so. Along the streets of almost any city 
where there are trees one sees places where a root has run 
under a sidewalk and in growing has lifted that sidewalk 
quite above the level. 

The ends of the harder roots are able to pump water if 
they happen to reach an actual stream of it, but the task 
of gathering it under ordinary conditions is assigned to a 
quite different group. Nearly all the larger roots send 
out near their ends great numbers of tiny threads known 
as root hairs. These forage for water where there seems 
28 


ROOTS ARE PUMPS 

to be none. Each of these root hairs, under the micro¬ 
scope, is seen to be a hollow tube. Each goes its way, 
feeling around among the gravel or grains of dirt for what 
moisture it can get. A pebble taken out of the ground is 
likely to be damp. It is, in fact, covered with a film of 
water. So are all the grains in damp soil. These tiny 
root hairs are able to suck up that water and start it up¬ 
ward. Every one of them in the darkness underground 
is gathering up this water that is scattered so very thinly 
through the soil. The amount of water that one rootlet 
gathers is very small indeed, but there are so many of 
them working at the task that the total that the roots of 
a single tree gather in a day may amount to many 
barrels. 

This water, pumped up into the leaves and combined 
with the carbon dioxide from the air, makes the sugar 
that is the plant’s chief food. But the roots also gather 
from the ground various minerals that are carried up with 
the water, and that serve a purpose in tree-building. 

Anybody who wants to can grow himself a plant which 
will develop root hairs that all may see. He has but to 
plant some grains of wheat or some radish seed on a flat 
cork floating in a jar of water and let it stand in a sunny 
window. The plant will grow up, and the roots will grow 
down. They will develop the structure in the water that 
they would develop in the ground and give an exhibition 
of what a plant has working for it underground. 


29 


XV 


EUROPEAN GRAPES DIE IN THE EAST 

I SN’T IT ODD that, when Europeans brought their 
grapevines to America and planted them alongside 
local varieties that were flourishing, the European vines 
languished and died! 

Yet this is just what happened. America had been 
called Vineland by Lief the Lucky, the Norwegian who 
came over four hundred years before Columbus did. 
There were more species of vine in America than in all 
the rest of the world combined. But the cultivated and 
improved varieties grown in Europe would not live any¬ 
where between Maine and Texas. Why they would not 
live in America remained a mystery for nearly three hun¬ 
dred years. 

The mystery became even greater after California was 
settled. The Spanish padres brought their grapes with 
them — these same varieties that would not live in the 
eastern states. In California they took root and pros¬ 
pered. The biggest grapevine in the world is growing 
today in Santa Barbara County, in California. It is of 
European stock. It was planted by a Mexican woman in 
1842. Its trunk is eight feet around, and its branches 
spread out until they cover half an acre. It yields ten 
tons of mission grapes a year. 

The early settlers in the eastern states made many 
efforts to grow the choice grapes to which they had been 
accustomed in Europe. Whole colonies of grape-growers 
30 


EUROPEAN GRAPES DIE IN THE EAST 

were sent over from France. They brought their best 
vines and applied the greatest skill to their cultivation. 
The vines grew through two or three seasons, languished, 
and died. 

In the meantime the wild grapes grew luxuriantly. 
The colonists cultivated them and improved their varie¬ 
ties. The people of the eastern states became accus¬ 
tomed to eating the descendants of these native grapes. 
The people of the Pacific Coast, on the contrary, grew 
only the aristocratic European varieties that man had 
grown and improved for ten thousand years. 

Finally, in the early part of this century, the cause of 
the blight on European grapes in the East was discovered. 
Throughout that region there existed an insect, a plant 
louse called phylloxera, which got into the roots of the 
grapevines and caused swellings, or galls, on them. The 
American varieties of vines had lived with this insect for 
thousands of years, had got used to it, and could get along 
in spite of it, but it was fatal to the imported varieties. 


31 


XVI 


CACTUS WATER BARRELS 

I SN’T IT ODD that plants which, in the beginning, 
came out of the water have learned, in some places, to 
live quite without it for months or even years! 

Take the members of the cactus family of the American 
Southwest, for instance. It is probably true that they 
have learned to live in drier places than any other of these 
plant children of the water. In Arizona, below the rim of 
mountains, lies the dry country, where the cacti have 
come to make their favorite home. 

These cacti are the camels of the plant world. They 
can go a long time without taking a drink. If they could 
not, they would not live long here. 

The cactus has learned to store water within itself and 
keep it there for extended periods, despite the fact that 
blazing sun and thirsty desert winds are always present 
and trying to drink it up. 

The barrel cactus furnishes a model example of water 
storage in the desert. It is as tall and nearly as big 
around as a flour barrel. It is armed on the outside with 
bristling thorns, which largely defend it from attack by 
animals. Then it is covered by a leathery green skin that 
is quite water-tight and air-tight. It has no leaves 
through which it gives off water as does the oak tree. 
There is almost no evaporation from it. 

Inside this cactus there are sections which resemble 
the wooden slats of a barrel and which keep the plant in 
32 


CACTUS WATER BARRELS 

shape. The greater part of its inside, however, is filled 
with wet and woody pulp somewhat like the white part 
of a watermelon rind. It is a huge sponge. When an 
occasional rain comes, the roots of the cactus drink it up 
rapidly and pump it up into this inner sponge. The ac¬ 
cordion pleats of its outer covering expand. Its girth in¬ 
creases. It lays in a water supply to last months or years. 
Then it draws on that supply very, very sparingly. Its 
life depends on not reducing it so low that it will not 
carry through to the next rain. 

It is almost unbelievable that these moisture pockets 
can exist here in the burning sands. Many a desert 
traveler, however, facing death by thirst, has cut into a 
barrel cactus and found that he could squeeze enough 
water from its pulp — not too tasty, to be sure — to keep 
him alive until he could find his way out of his desperate 
plight. 



33 








XVII 


THE ORIGIN OF SEEDLESS ORANGES 

I SN’T IT ODD that once in a while there appears on a 
tree a branch that yields a fruit which is quite differ¬ 
ent from that on the other branches! 

This has recently been happening in certain orange 
groves of California. It was found that here and there in 
an orchard a branch would appear with a rough-skinned, 
dwarfish, worthless fruit on it. Even whole trees were 
found that bore nothing but this useless fruit. 

The orchardmen owning these groves realized that they 
had let the stock of their trees run down or had been care¬ 
less in selecting the stock. These inferior trees had to be 
replaced. 

The orange-growers of California have, however, real¬ 
ized huge profits in the past from this tendency on the 
part of single branches to produce fruit that is different 
from that of the parent tree. In the present case the fruit 
is inferior, but there is a historical case of one of these 
offshoot fruits that was so far superior to the parent tree 
that it has become the most famous variety of fruit in all 
the world. 

The navel orange came about in just this way. It 
originated with a single branch of a single tree in Bahia, 
Brazil, away back in 1820. There was growing in that 
town an orange tree of a Portuguese stock that was fairly 
good. On one branch of it the fruit was peculiar and at¬ 
tracted attention. Its most distinguishing peculiarity 
34 


THE ORIGIN OF SEEDLESS ORANGES 

was the fact that it was seedless. In addition to this, its 
other qualities were quite satisfactory. Instead of being 
inferior to the parent, it was an improvement on it. 

Fortunately the owner of this tree was capable of ap¬ 
preciating the possibilities. He took buds from this 
branch and grafted them on other roots. Thus he started 
a new variety of orange. It was fifty years later that 
the United States Department of Agriculture introduced 
this orange into this country. It did splendidly in Cali¬ 
fornia, so well, in fact, that each year some twenty-five 
thousand carloads of its fruit are now leaving the state 
and being distributed wherever the market calls. 

This navel orange gets better results in winter in Cali¬ 
fornia than any other and has consequently been given a 
monopoly of the orange field for that season. Strange to 
say, it is not grown at all in Florida. In that state it 
yields such light crops that it does not pay to plant it. 


35 


XVIII 


BEANS ORIGINATED IN THE TROPICS 


I SN'T IT ODD that the bean 
plant, which is a child of the 
tropics, has been pushed gradu¬ 
ally to the north and south until 
it has so adapted itself that it 
will grow throughout most of 
the civilized world! 


i 



As a matter of fact this bean 
plant is not very well qualified 


to broadcast itself and would never have spread far but 
for the aid of man. In the beginning it seems that beans 
grew only in very limited areas in Asia and America. 
When the bean vine made its seeds, they dropped to the 
ground beneath it instead of being scattered about, and 
so the variety did not spread. It had no such trick as the 
pine cone, which may roll far away before scattering out 
its seed, or the thistledown, which may ride the wind for 
miles. 

So the bean stayed in its native home until man learned 
that it was good to eat. When he first began cultivating 
crops, he took these beans from place to place and planted 
them. 

Being tropical plants, they had to come into the north 
gradually. In this generation a striking example has been 
given of a warm climate bean coming to grow where it 
is cold. 


36 



BEANS ORIGINATED IN THE TROPICS 

To Florida a generation ago there came a new bean out 
of the tropics. It was called the velvet bean. It had a 
very rapid growth and produced a heavy crop chiefly 
used for feeding cattle. 

Because of its rapid growth people carried this velvet 
bean to North Carolina and planted it about their porches 
for shade. It served this purpose very well, but it never 
produced any beans. North Carolina was too cold for it. 
The summer was too short for it to ripen its crop before 
the frosts came in the autumn. The people of North 
Carolina had to send back to Florida every year for new 
seed of this vine to plant about their porches. 

But finally some one noticed that a single plant of the 
velvet bean actually had set and matured its seeds in 
North Carolina. He knew that this plant was one of 
those unusual individuals that crop out once in a while 
and have qualities different from others of its kind. 
These seeds were planted and developed a race of velvet 
beans that would grow in a tier of states farther north 
than did their ancestors. 

So was brought to those states a new crop that yielded 
them millions of dollars a year. So also was a demonstra¬ 
tion made of the manner in which tropical plants may 
spread gradually into the colder regions. 


37 


XIX 


THE SUNFLOWER COUSINS 

I SN’T IT ODD that, once given the key, one is able so 
easily to trace the relationships among the members 
of the biggest of the flower groups, those cousins that 
range from the sunflower to the dandelion! 

The thing that sets these plants apart from all 
others is the fact that their flowers are not single 
blooms but a large collection of little ones combined 
in a bundle. If the head of a sunflower is broken 
open the cups of its hundreds of small flowers will be 
revealed. 

One may prove to his own satisfaction that the dande¬ 
lion is a cousin of the sunflower by likewise breaking open 
its bloom. The many divisions of small flowers will be 
revealed. 

A young lady, after having played “ He loves me; he 
loves me not ” with a daisy, may break open its head and 
find these same divisions into many parts. 

A dahlia or a chrysanthemum of the garden, upon ex¬ 
amination, will be found to be built up in the same way. 
This chrysanthemum, in fact, is but a daisy that has gone 
through a long course of training in physical develop¬ 
ment. 

When that wealth of yellow goldenrod overruns the 
autumn world, one may examine its flowers also to find 
out if they belong to this sunflower-daisy-dandelion 
group. Surely enough, when the head is broken open, it 
38 


THE SUNFLOWER COUSINS 

is found that this is not a single flower but a group of 
them. 

Another member of the group, not quite so approach¬ 
able, is the thistle. Its bloom is not yellow like that of 
most of its relatives — a fact which might lead to an im¬ 
pression that it does not belong here. Then, too, it is 
much in the form of a paintbrush. It has not adopted 
the smoothfaced effect of some of the others. But if the 
flower is broken open, it will be found to be made up of 
many small divisions closely wedged together. 

The botanists call the flowers of this great group com¬ 
posites. When a composite is classified by the manner in 
which its blossom is put together, it then becomes easy 
to trace many other similarities of leaf, stalk, root, and 
manner of growth that run through the whole family. 


39 


XX 


THE ACORN TRADE-MARK 

I SN’T IT ODD that of all the trees in the world only 
the oak has ever learned to produce an acorn! 
Wherever one goes and finds acorns growing, he may 
know that the trees that yield them are oaks. Most 
people learn to know oak trees by their leaves. Those 
leaves are usually very irregular with deep notches cut 
into them. In a Southern forest, however, one might 
admire a stately tree with long narrow leaves like those 
of the willow. He might wonder what sort of tree it is. 
Then, suddenly, he would find acorns on it. He could not 
believe that this was an oak tree unless he knew that the 
acorn furnishes the test on which he may depend. This, 
in fact, is an oak and because of its peculiar leaves is called 
a willow oak. 

Then in Central Park, New York, he might admire a 
tall, round-topped tree and, judging by its leaves, might 
conclude that it was a chestnut. But, looking for its fruit, 
he again would find acorns. This, too, is an oak that is 
unusual as to its leaves. It is a chestnut oak. 

The live oaks of New Orleans have leaves somewhat 
like those of the magnolias that grow in the same region. 
The cork oak of Spain has none of the usual scallops in 
its leaves. But all have acorns. 

There are two groups of acorn-bearers. These groups 
are different from each other in the way in which they 
produce their acorns. One of these groups ripens its acorn 
40 


THE ACORN TRADE-MARK 

crop in a single year, and the other takes two years for 
the same work. Those that ripen their acorns in one year 
are the white oaks. Those that take two years are the 
black oaks. 

White oaks have round-cornered leaves, while the black 
oaks have sharp points at the turns. The trunks and 
limbs of the former are light, and those of the latter dark. 
The acorns of the white oaks are sweet, and of the black 
oaks bitter. The limbs of the white oaks are free of 
acorns in the winter time, while those of the black oak 
have half-grown nuts on them. 

Most people have noticed the catkins, tassel-like flow¬ 
ers, on the oak trees in the spring. It might be supposed 
that these are the acorn flowers, that acorns grow from 
them. This is not true. One may find other tiny little 
flowers among the leaves if he looks closely at the right 
time. It is these that produce the acorns. To be sure, 
they must be helped by the catkins. These catkins, as 
a matter of fact, are pollen-producers. The spring breezes 
take the pollen up and bear it away. They scatter 
some of it over the tiny, partly hidden flowers. This fer¬ 
tilizes the flowers, and they start at once to produce acorns 
from which mighty oaks grow. 


41 


XXI 


ELM-TREE BOUQUETS 

I SN’T IT ODD that millions of people every spring 
pass by and beneath Nature’s biggest and most 
shapely bouquets and yet do not know of their existence! 

Those bouquets are the elm trees in bloom. They 
blossom in the very early spring before even the leaves 
appear on the trees. They even go so far as to litter the 
ground with certain tokens of their coming, and yet few 
people pay any attention. 

These bouquets start out to surpass all others in the 
very form the elm tree takes in its growth. It sends up 
from the ground a sturdy column that is the stem of the 
great vase the elm is to build. Fifteen or twenty feet 
from the ground this stem divides into half a dozen 
branches. These branches continue upward, flaring 
slowly. They form the body of the great vase that is to 
be. Far up toward the top of the tree these master limbs 
divide into innumerable branches, which spill in all di¬ 
rections just as the sprays might from a great bouquet. 
Anybody who looks at an elm in the winter cannot fail to 
be impressed with the vase and bouquet form which its 
bare limbs make when they are seen against the sky. 

On the elm in winter there are two classes of buds. 
One kind is round and fat. These are the flower buds. 
The other is long and slim. These are the leaf buds. 

When the woody scales begin to litter the pavements 
under the elms, it is time to begin to look upward. These 
42 


ELM-TREE BOUQUETS 

scales are discarded by the flower buds as they unfold 
themselves. Yet how few people know this and realize 
that the great tree is flowering. 

A few stop to enjoy the evidence of the unfolding of 
early spring that is taking place overhead. Those who 
look up catch the mild, purplish tint that fills the whole 
treetop. A further investigation will show that every 
twig of the tree is hung with purplish, red-brown 
flowers. If it could be viewed from above, seen from 
the outside, its whole great dome, the biggest of any 
American tree, would appear as a mass of these flowers. 

Now it is that the elm, built like a vase and spilled 
over with the spray of its branches, comes into the day 
of its glory as Nature’s master vase. 

Some weeks later in the spring the elm again sprinkles 
the sidewalk. This time its offering is in the form of in¬ 
numerable particles that shimmer down through the air 
and sunshine or drift far away on the wind. These are 
disk-like in form. Their edges are built for air floating, 
but in the center is a hard little object that is an elm 
seed. It is thus that the great tree sets about getting its 
seeds planted that there may be other elms to bloom in 
the spring when it is gone. 


43 


XXII 


THE EARTH’S BIGGEST FRUIT 

I SN’T IT ODD that the largest fruit produced by any 
plant in the world grows on a weak and sprawling vine 
that is scarcely able to rear itself a foot from the ground! 

The pumpkin, it appears, is the largest of Nature’s 
seedpods — for all fruits are merely cases for their seeds. 
Not so big but possibly heavier is the watermelon. Both 
of these grow on spindling and trailing vines. The vines 
are much alike, for these plants are cousins, each being a 
gourd in a modified form. 

The very weakness of the vines that produce these 
fruits is an aid to their growing large. If a tree grew a 
pumpkin, it would have difficulty in hanging it in safety 
and in keeping it from swinging about and injuring itself. 
These vines that sprawl on the ground do not need to sup¬ 
port their fruit. They have but to lay it on the ground 
and let Mother Earth bear the burden. With the fruit 
lying there, they can pump nourishment into it and let 
it grow to a large size. 

Even the cantaloupe is larger than almost any of the 
fruits of trees. It also is related to the pumpkin and 
grows on an earthbound vine. 

The origin of the pumpkin, which is the biggest of 
fruits, is a matter of controversy among the scientists. 
There are those who maintain that it is a native Ameri¬ 
can, as are the potato, the tomato, the corn of the fields, 
and other crops that have come to be of outstanding im- 
44 


THE EARTH’S BIGGEST FRUIT 

portance. There are others who maintain that it came 
out of the Far East along with the cantaloupe and the 
cucumber, which are kindred gourds and grow on similar 
vines. 

Certain it is that the American Indians were found 
growing pumpkin vines among their corn not long after 
Europeans came to America. It may be that yet earlier 
Europeans had passed that way and left pumpkin seed. 
It is not known whether or not pumpkins existed in the 
East before Columbus discovered America. Whole groups 
of their kindred, such as squashes and muskmelons, were 
referred to in terms which were interpreted in English as 
“ gourds,” but whether or not any of them was the mod¬ 
ern pumpkin nobody has been able to find out. 



45 


XXIII 


THE OAK TREE COMES TO TOWN 

I SN’T IT ODD that the oak tree, king of the forest, has 
moved to the city and there established itself along 
the pavements and among the skyscrapers as the most 
successful member of the vegetable kingdom dwelling in 
these surroundings! Isnff it odd also that the squirrel, 
which feeds so largely on acorns, has been able to follow 
the oak to the city and adapt itself above all wild animals 
to life so close to man! 

Life in the cities has proved hard for most of the trees. 
The smoke and grime of it fills the pores of their leaves 
and stops their breathing. The ground about them is 
packed hard by many footsteps, and the soil from which 
they draw their nourishment is filled with city gases that 
poison them. They suffer accidents from time to time 
that leave wounds in their trunks which weaken them. 
The tall buildings give to the storms strange twists which 
make them unlike the storms to be borne in the open or 
in the woods. Few forest trees can long endure life in 
the great cities. 

But for a generation now the experts have been plant¬ 
ing oaks along city streets. This oak, they find, has a 
glossy leaf to which the soot does, not stick. It has a tap 
root that reaches and feeds deeply, so that conditions in 
the surface soil affect it little. It has a trunk of such 
strength and hardihood that accident affects it little. It 
does not have decayed spots that weaken such trees as 
46 


THE OAK TREE COMES TO TOWN 

the maple so that they break. The heart of the oak is 
very strong, and blow and twist as they may, the swirling 
city winds cannot snap it off or uproot it. It stands by 
the curb as the years pass and adds to its stature. Since 
it is given a span of years that runs from a thousand to 
two thousand, its passing through old age need not con¬ 
cern city managements of today. 

The white oak, the pin oak, the bur oak, and the scar¬ 
let oak are coming to cities. Of these the pin oak is most 
highly recommended. It has a stalwart trunk, limbs that 
stick straight out or a little downward, and a crown that 
comes to a point like an inverted cone. For twenty years 
the city authorities in Washington have been planting 
the pin oak almost exclusively. There are scores of miles 
of it running this way and that alongside the broad 
avenues of the District of Columbia. There is never a 
break in these avenues of trees. There is never a flaw in 
the manner of their growth. The idea of planting them 
is spreading throughout the land, and the cities of the 
future, if the present program continues, will be checker- 
boarded with oak trees that will drop their acorns in the 
autumn, to remind city folk that harvest time for the 
squirrels has come to the regions where trees find their 
natural homes. 


47 


XXIV 


AN UNSOLVED ORCHARD MYSTERY 

I SN’T IT ODD that that master product of the orchard, 
the grapefruit, has emerged from the West Indies in 
this generation and has attained its commanding position 
among breakfast table dishes, and yet its origin has re¬ 
mained an unsolved mystery of the vegetable world! 

Grapefruit is not native to the West Indies. It has 
been introduced into those islands. It has come to be 
cultivated in gardens since the white man came to know 
the islands. Its quality has been gradually improved, and 
it has come to be a dooryard fruit on many plantations. 
Finally, toward the end of the last century, it crossed over 
and gained a similar position in Florida. There, under 
the eye of scientific growers, superior varieties were se¬ 
lected, bred up, and grown in quantity. There, also, they 
were distributed to tourists from the North, a demand for 
them being thus started. 

In the nineties of the last century orange culture grew 
to be an extensive industry in Florida. It was profitable, 
and more and more people went into it. In fact, so many 
oranges were grown that, on account of the lack of refrig¬ 
eration and transportation facilities at that time, there 
was a threat of overproduction. Then, in 1894, Florida 
suffered a blightingly cold winter that killed her orange 
trees to the ground. Their stumps lived, however, and 
on these the planters grafted many acres of grapefruit for 
supplying an increasing demand. 

48 


AN UNSOLVED ORCHARD MYSTERY 

As its popularity increased, interest in this grapefruit 
grew. Men of science followed its back track in an at¬ 
tempt to find out where it came from. They traced it all 
through the islands to the south and finally to Barbadoes. 
It seemed that the original American grapefruit tree grew 
there. It was even found that there was a record of its 
planting. 

In the year 1696, according to this record, a certain 
Captain Shaddock came to port in the Barbadoes. He 
was on his way home after many wanderings in the 
Orient. He had collected many things — among them 
seeds of various plants he had found growing around the 
world. Some of these he gave to the people of the islands 
to plant. 

These seeds yielded among other things the original 
grapefruit trees. From them have come all the grape¬ 
fruit trees of the Western World. When this product be¬ 
came popular in the United States, the botanists at¬ 
tempted to classify it. They gave it its proper place in 
the rue family, to which all the citrus fruits belong. Then 
they began inquiring for other specimens of it. But they 
failed to find a single one. If Captain Shaddock found it 
in the East, he did more than modern explorers have suc¬ 
ceeded in doing. It may exist there, but it has evaded 
search. Possibly it has become extinct. 


49 


XXV 


A LILY THAT WE EAT 

I SN’T IT ODD that the onion, when one examines its 
family tree, is found to be a lily! 

What is even more shocking is the fact that the odorous 
garlic, so dear to people of the Mediterranean, likewise 
turns out to be a member of this aristocratic plant family. 

The botanist can tell whether or not a plant is a lily by 
examining its roots. Most members of the lily group are 
herbs that die when the frost comes in autumn. But they 
have worked out a scheme for storing up plant food in a 
bulb and leaving it in the ground to start the young lily 
in the spring. The yellow trout lily by the brookside, for 
example, can draw on this food supply and get started by 
the time the snow melts. It can get sunshine even in the 
woods before the leaves come out on the trees, and make 
its early bloom and seed. 

The lily bulb is built up layer by layer as is the onion. 
Bulbs that one buys at the florist’s and plants for spring 
flowers, such as hyacinths and tulips, are members of the 
lily family. 

These plants have narrow, sheathlike leaves that are 
plainly of the same kind. All have six-petaled flowers 
that are trumpet or bell-shaped. All have the same sort 
of stems. It is easy to tell a member of the lily family 
once one begins to think of these traits of the tribe. 

The onion grows from a true lily bulb. It has a lily 
stalk, lily leaves, and its flower is clearly a lily. The 
50 


A LILY THAT WE EAT 

garlic plant looks very much like it. The bulbs of these 
plants were among the early foods of the human animals. 
A long time ago some one who was able to read certain 
hieroglyphics in one of the pyramids found that the rec¬ 
ord was of the food bought for the workmen who were 
building it. It seems that one thousand six hundred tal¬ 
ents, which was a great deal of money in those days, had 
been set down against the purchase of garlic, onions, and 
radishes. 



51 


XXVI 


CHAPARRAL IS A PLAGUE 

I SN’T IT ODD that great stretches of the West, such, 
for example, as that vast expanse from San Antonio 
to El Paso, Texas, in which the state of New York might 
be lost, and which was once a rolling prairie land, have 
changed their nature and today are endless thickets of 
chaparral brush! 

Chaparral, a sort of brush reaching as high as a man on 
horseback, is a hardy and greedy growth that seems to lie 
in wait for bits of land that it can claim for its own. 
When a lumberman, for instance, cuts the timber off a 
mountainside in California, the chaparral rushes in, blan¬ 
kets it with a thick growth, and crowds all other vegeta¬ 
tion so vigorously that the latter has no chance. Over 
great areas wherever the land owner lets his fields lie 
idle, the chaparral begins its invasions. Even the vacant 
lots in many cities farther east tend to become chapar¬ 
ral thickets, in which young make-believe bandits hide 
themselves and in imagination go back to the methods 
employed by their robber-baron ancestors of a few 
centuries ago. 

But nowhere have the changes brought about by the 
crowding in of the chaparral been so marked as in the 
prairie regions of the Southwest. In west Texas, for in¬ 
stance, the open reaches of grassy plains offered one of 
the finest stretches of grazing lands that the world has 
known. The descendants of the cattle that Cortez and 
52 


CHAPARRAL IS A PLAGUE 

other Spaniards turned loose in Mexico had become a 
wild breed of longhorns and lived in this region before the 
white man settled here. They were the basis of the herds 
that the cattle barons managed and brought to vast num¬ 
bers in the years that followed the Civil War. 

But now the prairies are gone. The herds that wan¬ 
dered over them remain but in fragments. In their place 
are endless stretches of all-smothering chaparral. 

There is an interesting reason why these prairies re¬ 
mained prairies. They did so because every few years 
it happened that the grass was tall, dry, and parched 
toward the end of the summer. Then a bolt of lightning 
or a spark from the campfire of a red man set the plain 
afire. The flames swept a whole region, searing any shrub 
or baby tree that may have sprung up here hoping to start 
a line of its kind. Only the grass seeds, already shaken 
on to the earth, escaped. So the next season there was 
only grass to reappear. 

But man put an end to the prairie fires. He learned 
the knack of back-firing and stopping them. He devel¬ 
oped such numbers of cattle that they ate the grass too 
short for these fires. He fenced off his ranches and 
changed them from the ways of nature which they had 
always known. 

And the chaparral, in the absence of the searing flame 
which was its only successful enemy, got started and 
prospered. Its thickets have transformed and laid waste 
vast areas that through the ages offered home and food 
to innumerable hordes of grazing animals. 

53 


XXVII 


THE CABBAGE COUSINS 

I SN’T IT ODD that a wild plant that grows on the 
chalk cliffs of England has some children that ride 
about the country in carloads as cabbage heads, other off¬ 
spring that we call Brussels sprouts, and still others that 
are sold in the markets of the world as cauliflower! 

Wild cabbages still grow in southern and western Eu¬ 
rope. They look much like the domestic variety, except 
that they are scrubby and undeveloped. They are plants 
of the wild mustard family that have a tendency to de¬ 
velop their leaves in a bunch. That tendency has been 
highly developed since man began to cultivate cabbage 
in his garden. The cabbage has grown more solid and 
bigger for centuries. Now it is one of the most important 
green leaf foods in the world. 

After cabbage had been living a long time in gardens, 
it was noticed that there was an occasional plant that 
grew quite differently from the rest. These plants in¬ 
stead of devoting all their attention to the one big head 
developed rows of buttons up and down their stems like 
those a bell boy wears on his jacket. These buttons, it 
was found, were in reality small cabbages. Upon trial 
they proved to be very tender and good to eat. It was in 
Belgium that the gardeners first undertook to develop 
these tiny cabbages along the stems of their garden vege¬ 
tables as an independent crop. They bred a variety of 
cabbage that had a long stem with scores of these buttons 
54 


THE CABBAGE COUSINS 

clustered upon it. The new crop was called Brussels 
sprouts, after the capital of the country in which they 
were developed. 

As cabbages were cultivated more and more, others 
developed a quite different peculiarity. When they came 
to bloom, they did not always do so normally. Occasion¬ 
ally there would be a bloom that would be quite swollen 
and thick. It was a very meaty sort of bloom. In France 
the peasants tested it and found it good to eat. They 
selected the cabbage plants that yielded it and from them 
produced a generation of cabbages that had these swollen 
flowers. They carried these to market and sold them. 
They called the new plant choufleur, or “ cabbage 
flower.” Cauliflower comes from that word. It has been 
said of this vegetable that it is a cabbage with a college 
education. 


55 


XXVIII 


THE TURNIP CULTIVATES ITSELF 



X pie plant like a turnip, in 
order to accomplish a given 
end, is smart enough to lay 
down a campaign that runs 
through two years and then 
to stick to it and work it out! 


i 


When the gardener plants 


SN’T IT ODD that a sim- 


turnip seed, cultivates the resulting plants, cuts off the 
tops and eats them for greens, and finally, in the autumn, 
pulls up the great, round turnips and stores them as food 
for the family, he may not realize that he is doing some¬ 
thing very much like what the plant itself does. 

This first year’s growth of a turnip does not serve the 
purpose that the plant has in mind. It has started from 
the seed and sent out a handsome tuft of leaves. These 
leaves out in the sunshine are the plant’s food factory. 
They take out of the air elements with which they make 
sugar or starch to store away in this root. 

Throughout the summer they store this food much as 
the squirrel might store nuts. Then in the autumn the 
top lies down without ever having made seed. This root, 
however, sits in the ground and nurses the spark of life 
through the winter. When spring comes again, it sends 
up a stalk. It does not pay so much attention to develop¬ 
ing its cluster of leaves as it did the year before. It al- 


56 






THE TURNIP CULTIVATES ITSELF 

ready has a good supply of food laid up in this root. It 
can feed on that and set about the serious business in the 
life of every plant, which is that of making seed to carry 
life on to future generations. 

The plant that it develops looks quite different from 
the bunch of leaves of the first year. It is a tall stalk 
bearing a spray of flowers at the end. This stalk devours 
the turnip in the ground just as effectually as its fellow 
that was put in the cellar was eaten by the family. By 
the time the seeds are ripe, the root is a mere shell. 

There are a good many plants that have this two-year 
method of life and store up food in a fat root for the sec¬ 
ond season. The radish, which is closely related to the 
turnip, both being members of the mustard family, is one. 
The carrot, which is a member of the parsley family, is 
another. The beet, which belongs to the goosefoot fam¬ 
ily, is another. Onions and garlic, which belong to the lily 
family, do a similar thing, though they have a different 
sort of storage, in a bulb built up of layers. 

So this two-year system of storage of food below the 
ground is not a peculiarity of any particular breed of 
plants, but a resort of many of them in many families. 


57 


XXIX 


DATES AND THEIR NATIVE HOME 

I SN’T IT ODD that two-thirds of the date-palm trees 
of the world grow in the barren desert country of 
Arabia, where almost no other plant can survive! 

Arabia lies between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea 
and is a mere peninsula of sand that is one of the driest 
and hottest spots in all the world. The shores of the 
Persian Gulf are believed to be the native home of the 
date. The historic Euphrates and Tigris rivers join sev¬ 
enty miles from the Gulf, forming the Shatt-el-Arab 
river, along which there is a solid forest of cultivated date 
palms two or three miles wide all the way to it's mouth. 

There are five million trees in this orchard, while there 
are but twenty-five million in all the rest of the world. 
Twenty million of the date-palm trees grow in Arabia 
alone. 

This comes about because a date tree is so constituted 
that it must have its feet in the water and its top in the 
blistering sun. These Arabian rivers, notably the Eu¬ 
phrates, furnish water that makes it easy to irrigate the 
date groves, and the dry heat provides ideal conditions for 
ripening the fruit. It is these conditions that, through 
the ages, have developed this plant of such peculiar 
habits. 

Far in the interior of Arabia there are watered spots 
where dates thrive and considerable numbers of people 
make their homes, never seen by the outside world and 
58 


DATES AND THEIR NATIVE HOME 

subsisting almost entirely upon dates. Others nearer the 
coast send out their product by camel caravan. At such 
ports as Bassorah and Masket thirty thousand to forty 
thousand tons of dates accumulate and are shipped to 
foreign markets each year. 

From the region of the Persian Gulf the date tree 
spread westward. The Egyptians came to cultivate it. 
It spread to the oases of the Sahara desert, where condi¬ 
tions exist that are very similar to those in Arabia. There 
it proved a godsend to the sons of the desert. Tall date 
trees hundreds of years old form a semi-shade, in which 
such other tropical fruits as figs may be grown. It is a 
strange world that dwells in these hot lands, shaded and 
fed by this picturesque palm. 

The date palm will grow much farther north, but its 
fruit will ripen only in the presence of intense and long- 
continued heat. The trees are grown for ornamental pur¬ 
poses throughout much of Europe and the United States, 
but they bear no fruit. They furnish wisps for button¬ 
holes on Palm Sunday. 

Down in the Southwest, however, in Arizona and the 
southern California desert country, rainless regions ex¬ 
ist, in which the fruit can be brought to maturity. Men 
of science from the United States have combed the world 
for the best date trees, have established them in these 
regions, and have developed varieties that are superior to 
those which grow where dates originated. The United 
States today produces better dates than Arabia or Egypt. 


59 


XXX 


SENTINELS OF THE DESERT 

I SN’T IT ODD that nature has set up innumerable 
fluted Grecian vegetable pillars in the dry lands of the 
Southwest as though to mark the ruins of a world where 
plant life hardly exists! 

The sahuaro, king of the cacti, sentinel of the desert, 
here holds sway. It lifts its solemn column to heights of 
forty or fifty feet. Its natural growth is in a single shaft, 
but it sometimes happens that, high up, the monarch 
branches out into three or four or half a dozen columns, 
standing like huge cluster candlesticks awaiting the com¬ 
ing of the lamplighter. When the giant branches thus, 
it is usually because the normal trunk has been wounded 
or broken. 

Nobody knows how long it has taken these vegetable 
columns to erect themselves there in the desert. When 
occasional rains come, they fill their inner barrels with 
water and seal it in. They draw on this sparingly for 
growth and, when the supply runs low, cease growing 
altogether. From man’s observation in the generation 
or two that he has been watching them, he has become 
convinced that some of these sentinels have been stand¬ 
ing guard here for three or four centuries. 

These great leafless trees of a strange tribe must be 
able to cling tightly to life, or they would not survive here 
in the desert. There is evidence to show how heroic is the 
struggle one of them may make when a storm uproots it. 
60 


SENTINELS OF THE DESERT 

The form, though it is struck down, may keep on living. 
The roots may cling to the desert soil and pump water 
into the fallen barrel when it rains. The tip of the tor¬ 
tured trunk may turn skyward and, when springtime 
comes, put forth its gorgeous blossoms and ripen fruit 
and seed. 

Sahuaros like to form in stately companies that march 
solemnly up some rocky hillside. They may group them¬ 
selves on an open plain and form silhouettes against scar¬ 
let sunsets. They may have scattered greasewood and 
palo-verde bushes about their feet. Wherever one of 
them offers a crotch, a red-tailed hawk is likely to come 
to make a nest. The sand storms play a soughing tune 
upon their bristling tines, and the clumsy Gila monster 
makes its home beneath their shade. On the desert the 
sahuaro is supreme. 



61 
















XXXI 


THE PINE FAMILY IS OLD 

I SN’T IT ODD that the cone-bearing trees are old- 
timers under the sun, but that those with broad leaves 
are newcomers! 

Geologists know the relative ages of the different kinds 
of rocks that make up the earth’s crust. They know that 
certain of them were laid down millions of years before 
others. Where there were plants, they left their im¬ 
pressions on the forming rocks, and their pictures were 
thus preserved. 

The world had existed for some time when vegetable 
life first appeared in the water and finally scrambled out 
on the land. Among the earlier plants to leave their im¬ 
pressions on the rocks that were forming were algae. An¬ 
other that appeared in the long ago was the cat-tail that 
still grows in modern marshes. Ferns were an early form, 
and tree ferns were among the first plants to lift them¬ 
selves high above the ground. 

Then came the cone-bearers. Evidence of the existence 
of these trees is found in early formations, along with evi¬ 
dence of cat-tails and ferns. They are, in fact, a primitive 
tribe, in a way, much less highly developed than is the 
oak or the sycamore. They occupy a place in the vege¬ 
table world that is somewhat like that of the lizard and 
the kangaroo in the animal world. They are of a once 
ruling race which is well along toward the discard. 

The cone-bearing trees, for example, have no well- 
62 


THE PINE FAMILY IS OLD 

developed female flowers. Their seed germs develop 
along the ridge of what is to be a cone. They are not 
hidden away in elaborate blooms. They are what the 
botanists call naked seeds. The male flowers of the pine 
cluster about the bases of new, green sprigs and make a 
good deal of a show in yellow and scarlet in the spring¬ 
time. They produce the pollen, which finally fills the 
woods with its drifting, yellow powder. The winds waft 
grains of it to the naked germs on the growing cones. 
They are fertilized, and seeds result. 

The younger trees that arrived in later ages developed 
their broad leaves and elaborate flowers, set nectar in 
them as a bribe to bees, and got their pollen carried by 
the bees from one to the other. But there were no bees 
when the pine trees developed, and so they had to depend 
on the wind. 

In later times various trees came to depend on animals 
and birds to carry their seeds abroad, that they might 
find new places in which to grow. The apple made itself 
good to eat, so that man or beast might carry it away, eat 
it, and throw its core, containing the seeds, on the ground. 
But the pine tree put wings on its seeds, that they might 
ride away on the wind. When they are ready to take 
flight, the cone opens and lets a seed out from the base 
of each of its scales. The seed has wings and may ride 
down the wind for half a mile before it stops. 


63 


XXXII 


THE BEGINNING OF RUBBER 

I SN'T IT ODD that, when the automobile came along 
and needed a huge supply of rubber for tires, the rub¬ 
ber was ready and waiting! 

There is a natural history romance in the way this 
came to be possible. There is romance enough, to be sure, 
in the mere fact that the automobiles of the world roll 
around on tires that are made of the juice of a tree. 
There is romance in the manner in which many natives 
of the tropics build up strange milk routes for themselves 
in the dense and solitary forests. They cut trails from 
rubber tree to rubber tree. Every day they visit each 
tree on this trail and wound it. From each wound rubber 
milk flows. From all the milk that could be thus col¬ 
lected, thirty thousand tons of rubber a year was made. 

Nobody knew that there was to be a time when there 
would be automobiles that would run on rubber tires. 
Fifty years ago, however, a wise Englishman acted as 
though he knew. His name was Henry Wickham, and he 
had lived long in the Amazon Valley of South America 
and studied rubber. He came to the conclusion that 
rubber should be grown on plantations. He thought that 
it might be grown in India, which was ruled by the Brit¬ 
ish. He set about making this idea a reality. 

First Wickham convinced the English men of science 
who managed Kew Gardens, in London, that rubber 
should be grown in the East. Then he convinced the 
64 


THE BEGINNING OF RUBBER 

Indian government. He was given money to carry on his 
experiment. 

He went again to South America. He found the spot 
where the best rubber trees grew. They grew seeds an 
inch long, three in a pod. When the seeds were ripe, 
these pods exploded, throwing the seeds as far as fifty 
feet. The trouble with these seeds was that they would 
not keep. They must be planted while they were fresh, 
or they would not grow. 

Wickham chartered a tramp steamer and rushed seeds 
to Kew Gardens. There they were grown until the 
plants were a year old. These plants were hurried to 
India and to the Malay States bordering the Indian 
Ocean. There, in botanic gardens, notably in Singapore, 
they grew to be splendid trees. 

Nobody would have paid any attention to them, how¬ 
ever, had not the coffee crop failed. The planters of this 
region had to have something to take the place of coffee 
in furnishing them a means of livelihood. They planted 
rubber trees. It is doubtful if these plantings would have 
paid if it had not happened that, about the time they 
came into bearing, the automobile appeared, to use all the 
rubber from their juice and beg for more. The planta¬ 
tions were enlarged, and the business grew. And so it 
happened that the rubber supply which makes the auto¬ 
mobile possible comes from the opposite side of the world 
from the natural home of the tree that supplies it. 


65 


XXXIII 


LETTUCE IS RELATED TO THE SUNFLOWER 

I SN'T IT ODD that in the 
classification of plants the 
botanists have found that let¬ 
tuce, which one eats with 
French dressing for dinner, is 
not related to the cabbage 
which it resembles or to cel¬ 
ery or spinach or any other 
leafy vegetable, but to the sunflower! 

The sunflower heads a family of which the daisy is a 
prominent member. So are the thistle, the blue corn¬ 
flower, and the radiant goldenrod. A member of the fam¬ 
ily that makes a closer approach to the lettuce plant is 
the dandelion. This has a rosette of leaves hugging the 
ground, as has the lettuce plant. It is even sometimes 
cultivated as a leaf vegetable. 

Yet lettuce is not a bred-up dandelion. The dandelion 
sends up a single tube when its time comes to flower, 
while the lettuce sends up a spray bearing many flowers. 
This shows that they are cousins, not brothers. 

One might not realize that the lettuce is a member of 
the daisy and sunflower family until it came to bloom. 
Then he would see that it had qualities which put it into 
that family and show it to be different from all other 
families in the world. This family has a composite 
bloom. This means that its flower is a big one made up 
66 



LETTUCE IS RELATED TO THE SUNFLOWER 

of many little ones put together. Break a sunflower or a 
daisy apart and it is easy to see these groups of small 
flowers bound into a circular bouquet. 

The fact that big, solid heads of lettuce are sold in the 
market is due to man’s cleverness in developing plants 
to serve his purposes. Man has been eating lettuce for 
many centuries. It probably started out as a plant not 
greatly different from the dandelion. Then man kept 
selecting the plants that were bunchiest for the seed for 
the next generation. Thus the heads of the lettuce kept 
getting more and more solid. They were much more 
compact in Caesar’s time than when Aristotle wrote about 
them 350 years earlier. Queen Elizabeth had yet choicer 
lettuce when Walter Raleigh came to her house to dine. 
Her salad, however, could not be compared to that served 
by the tall King Albert of Belgium, when he entertained 
an American aviator, equally tall, who had flown from 
New York to Paris without stopping. 

Lettuce has in fact, been steadily improved because 
man has used his intelligence as he plied his rake and hoe 
in the garden. 


67 


XXXIV 


WHEAT IS A GRASS 

I SN’T IT ODD that, when men of science dig back into 
the ruins of lost civilizations of the Near East, upon 
which those of today were built, they always find the re¬ 
mains of one crop plant — wheat! 

Usually these remains are found in charred form be¬ 
cause charred articles are little given to decay and may 
remain unchanged for thousands of years. This wheat, 
as far back as students have been able to find it, has been 
about as well developed and has had as good kernels as 
the wheat of modern times. 

This latter fact shows that it was by no means new 
when it was used by these ancient peoples. 

Wheat, of course, was at one time a wild grass. Man 
came to grow it about his early home and to select the 
better sorts for planting. By selecting better seeds all 
the time, the quality of the grain was improved. Since 
it was highly developed in the time of the earliest civili¬ 
zations of which we know, it must even then have been 
cultivated a long time. 

There are wild grasses, now growing that bear much re¬ 
semblance to wheat, but none of the,se is enough like it to 
make it certain that it is the variety from which wheat 
originally came. Some hold that there is wild wheat now 
growing here and there. Others argue that if there is, it 
is cultivated wheat that has but recently got into the 
wild state. It seems pretty sure that cultivated wheat 
68 


WHEAT IS A GRASS 

will not survive in the wild state. It has had the advan¬ 
tage of the care of man so long that it can no longer live 
without it. 

The best authorities are inclined to the belief that 
wheat originated in what is now Macedonia and was 
taken from there to ancient Egypt and Canaan. It grew 
in importance when man became so ingenious as to grind 
it by rolling one stone against another. When the patient 
bullock was hitched to a sweep that furnished power for 
a mill, it again forged ahead. Windmills and waterwheels 
helped it toward popularity, though, through the dark 
ages, the milling and the bread that resulted was so poor 
that it came to be known as the black bread period. Mod¬ 
ern milling has developed a flour from wheat which is so 
far superior to that from any other source that wheat has 
become the chief bread material of all peoples whose 
prosperity is such that they can afford it. 


69 


XXXV 


THE BANANA PLANT IS ALL LEAVES 

I SN'T IT ODD that the banana plant has a way of 
growing which makes it so different from other plants 
that it has almost no relatives! 

To be sure, it has one relative that grows in almost any 
park and in many private gardens. Everybody knows 
the canna with the great purple leaves. It is close kin 
to the banana plant and grows in much the same way. 

Two great differences in plants are that some of them 
are outside growers, and others are inside growers. The 
apple tree, for instance, is an outside grower. Every year 
it puts a new layer of wood on the outside of its trunk. 
The grass of the field, on the contrary, is an inside grower. 
The lower stem remains the same size, but new joints and 
blades are put forth from the inside. 

But there are several styles of these inside growers. 
Sugar cane is a grass and puts on one joint after another, 
much as boys put one hand above another on a baseball 
bat to see who shall have first choice. The grasses grow 
at the top. They are inside growers that have joints. 

The palm tree is an inside grower, but goes about grow¬ 
ing in a different way. It builds itself a chimney. The 
material to make new leaves and to add to the height of 
the chimney comes up through the inside. The chimney 
may stand for a hundred years without getting any bigger 
around. 

The banana plant is an inside grower, but it builds its 
70 


THE BANANA PLANT IS ALL LEAVES 

stalk in a different way. Its specialty is leaves. Some¬ 
times these leaves are ten feet long. They have broad 
sheaths where they clasp the stalk of the plant. The 
lower leaves die as the tree grows up, but these sheaths 
stay in place and become parts of the stalk. It is built 
up of them. It is as though the stalk were made up of 
wrappings of one layer of paper after another. As the 
plant grows, these layers of sheaths give a bit and the 
stalk grows larger. 

Thus a banana plant has no trunk such as trees have. 
It has no jointed stems such as grasses have. It is merely 
a paper affair built layer on layer. 

But up through the center of this stalk a channel is left. 
Through this channel, when the time is right, the great 
flower of the plant pushes its way. It appears at the top 
of the plant as big as an ear of corn. It pushes out a 
long neck which bends far over. A bunch of bananas de¬ 
velops on this stem. When these have been ripened the 
plant considers that its work is done and dies. It has 
provided for future generations, however, by sending up 
around its root new shoots that will grow into trees. 


71 


XXXVI 


TAPPING RUBBER TREES 

I SN’T IT ODD that the rubber tree produces two kinds 
of sap, one of which makes it grow and the other of 
which yields rubber for the use of man! 

The sap of all trees flows up through the tender spring 
wood, just under the outer bark, carrying nourishment 
to every leaf and twig. This peculiar rubber tree has an¬ 
other liquid that flows through a different set of channels. 
It is like the arrangement in the houses of man. The gas 
comes in through different pipes from those that carry 
the water. Not even the scientists are yet quite certain 
as to the purpose the tree has in producing this rubber 
juice. Practical men, however, have found a use for it. 

Natives in the woods of South America hack deep 
gashes in the rubber trees to cause them to “ bleed ” this 
white juice, which is called latex. On the plantations 
around Singapore, in the Indian Ocean, more care is 
taken. There the trained tappers know how to make the 
latex flow without cutting deeply enough to tap the sap 
wells that are in the inner bark. 

A groove is cut down the side of one of these trees. It 
leads to the cup that sits on the ground beneath. Three 
or four feet up the tree two gashes six inches long are cut 
across the grain. They lead out from the groove in the 
shape of a V. They cut into the cells that hold the latex. 
The latex begins to flow and drain down the groove into 
the cup. 


72 


TAPPING RUBBER TREES 

It flows for only a short time. When the tapper comes 
around the next day to'get his cup of juice, he finds the 
flow has stopped. With his sharp knife he shaves a thin 
layer off the side of the gash he cut the day before. This 
starts the flow of latex again. This goes on day after day. 
Each day the tree has yielded some of the juice from 
which rubber is made. 

The problem is to wound the tree in such a way as to 
get as much latex out of it as possible and still not to in¬ 
jure it. The object is to get the greatest possible amount, 
not this week or this month but year after year as long as 
the tree may live. If it is bled too much, it may be weak¬ 
ened and fall off in its yield of rubber. 

By cutting only a thin layer from the wound every 
day, it may take years to work down one side. When the 
base of the tree is finally reached, the tapper goes around 
to the other side and begins all over again. By the time 
he has worked slowly down that side, the old wounds have 
entirely healed and he may begin all over again. 


73 


XXXVII 


THORNS THAT ARE LEAVES 

I SN’T IT ODD that desert plants tend to do away with 
those leaves without which ordinary trees cannot live, 
but that they still get along quite well! 

Different cactus plants like the sahuaro or the prickly 
pear have turned their leaves into thorns. These thorns 
have come to be used to protect the plant, whereas leaves 
ordinarily are factories in which its food is made. From 
the standpoint of the mass of the vegetation of the world 
cacti are plants without leaves. 

These desert plants have trained their bark to do the 
work of leaves. It is the green in leaves that breaks up 
certain of the sun’s rays and uses their power in extracting 
carbon dioxide from the air and combining it with water 
from the ground to make sugar, which is the chief build¬ 
ing material of plants. 

If you examine one of these desert plants that in part 
or in whole has done away with its leaves, you will prob¬ 
ably find that it has a green skin or bark. The cacti have 
these green skins. The palo-verde is a desert tree with 
a green bark. Palo-verde means green pole in Spanish. 
Palo-verde and the thorny ocotillo have small leaves, var¬ 
nished air-tight so that no moisture can get out through 
them, but their green bark does most of the work of food¬ 
making. 

Desert trees like the mesquite, the catclaw, and the 
creosote bush are able to suspend life for long periods be- 
74 


THORNS THAT ARE LEAVES 

tween rains. They lie dormant, much as the bear does 
when it is snowed in for the winter. This method is dif¬ 
ferent from that of the cactus, which stores water inside 
its trunk, or the yucca, which puts it away in the thick 
ends of its bayonet-tipped leaves. 

The century plant stores water and food in its thick¬ 
ened leaves. When its time to bloom comes, it can draw 
on this stored energy and from it send up a stalk twenty 
feet high and hang out no less than seven thousand 
fragrant flowers. 



75 




XXXVIII 


FUNGI ARE THE CLEAN-UP SQUAD 

I SN’T IT ODD that the mold on decaying fruit, the 
bracket fungi on dead branches of trees, the mush¬ 
rooms that spring up among dead leaves in the autumn — 
all that fungous growth which man instinctively despises 
— are steadily aiding in one of the great processes of 
nature! 

The fungi are agents of decay. When plant growth has 
served its purpose, it is the business of the fungi to break 
it down again and turn it back to the soil and the air from 
which it came. The fungi are the vultures of the vege¬ 
table world — they do away with its dead bodies. 

If the woods were free of toadstools and other plants 
of their kind, there would be no decay. The leaves would 
fall year after year and lie where they fell. Dead logs 
would be infinitely longer in disappearing. The world 
would be so cluttered up that it would be quite over¬ 
whelmed by its own waste. 

Wherever there is waste vegetable matter, these fungi 
await an opportunity to appear and break it down. The 
old stump in the woods soon becomes a setting for in¬ 
numerable dainty friar’s cowls. A dead branch high up 
in the tree is attacked by a breed of cousin plants. The 
mushrooms on the ground are breaking down the struc¬ 
ture of the fallen leaves. The ear-shaped fungus that 
appears on rotting wood, the elf-cups on the ground, the 
coral scale on a tree trunk, the fluted plates that feed only 
76 


FUNGI ARE THE CLEAN-UP SQUAD 

on hardwoods, the puffballs that attack decaying stumps, 
the earthstars that feed upon fallen pine needles, are all 
busily sending vegetation back to the elements from 
which it came. 

There are many varieties of fungi, all doing the same 
sort of work, that are so small that their nature does not 
appear. Ordinary mold is such a fungus and is cousin to 
the mushroom. When the skin of a peach is broken, the 
spores of a fungus mold get through it and set up decay. 

Thus the kin of the mushroom tribe start vegetable 
products back to their elements more quickly than man 
would like. The whole battle for the preservation of 
fruits and vegetables is a fight against members of this 
pale fungus plant family. They are desperate enemies 
of man in many ways, but they aid him greatly by clean¬ 
ing up the rubbish. 


77 


XXXIX 


THE WAX BERRY IS A POISON SIGN 

I SN’T IT ODD that one sumac bush grows on the up¬ 
land and is mild, sweet, and helpful to man, while an¬ 
other grows in the swamp and poisons him at the slightest 
touch! 

These two sumac bushes look very much alike, but 
when they are carefully examined, they are found to have 
certain differences. Each of them has a long leaf stem 
with leaflets opposite each other and a single one at the 
tip. The poison sumac may have from seven to thirteen 
of these leaflets to the stem, but never more. The upland 
sumac may have from nine to thirty-one leaflets. 

The upland sumac has red berries in the autumn. The 
poison sumac has white, waxy berries somewhat like those 
of the mistletoe. 

And here is another strange thing. These same white 
berries with a single seed appear on two other plants. 
These are the so-called poison oak and the poison ivy, 
neither of which is either oak or ivy, and neither of which 
looks in any other way like the poison sumac. The ber¬ 
ries of these two plants are almost identical. Then, 
strangely, they have that mean trait of the sumac of poi¬ 
soning human beings at a touch. This trade-mark of the 
white wax berry binds the three plants together. It shows 
that they are of the same breed. They are all, in fact, 
members of the sumac family. Poison oak and poison ivy 
are cousins of the sumac that scalds. 


78 


THE WAX BERRY IS A POISON SIGN 

This trait that is common to these three cousins, of the 
sumac family, does not exist in most of the other sumacs. 
There is the smoke bush of American gardens. It, too, is 
a sumac. The mango tree of the tropics is a sumac. 
Most of the sumacs, in fact, are tropical plants. The tree 
that yields the pistachio nut is a sumac, as is that which 
produces the cashew nut. 

In the Orient there are certain sumac trees that yield 
shellac and varnishes. The black varnish of Burma is 
from one of these trees. In these varnishes now and again 
there crops up the curse of the sumacs. It poisons people, 
burning and blistering them. The burning and blistering 
is the same as that of the poison ivy of the United States, 
on the other side of the world. 


79 


XL 


FRANCO-AMERICAN GRAPEVINES 

I SN'T IT ODD that all the grapevines of France, grown 
in enormous quantities for the manufacture of Bur¬ 
gundy, Champagne, and other wines, have American 
roots! 

The tops of these grapevines, throughout France, are 
of the native French varieties that have yielded their 
choice grapes through the centuries. The roots, how¬ 
ever, are of the wild grapevines of America, which are 
incapable of producing fruit that would furnish wine 
acceptable to the cultivated European palate. 

There is a long and tragic story of a miracle of science 
back of these fields of vines that are American below the 
ground and European above. It began about half a cen¬ 
tury ago when a blight struck the vineyards of France 
and they began to wither and die. 

Science, hurrying to the rescue, found that a tiny in¬ 
sect, a plant louse, which they called phylloxera, was at¬ 
tacking the roots of these vines and causing their death. 
These insects formed galls in which to hatch their young, 
and these galls killed the vines. 

In studying this insect, in attempts to find out how to 
fight it, it was learned that the United States was its 
native home. It was the insect that had made it impos¬ 
sible to grow European grapes in the eastern states. But 
the American grapevines had got used to it, through liv¬ 
ing with it for centuries, and did not mind it. 

80 


FRANCO-AMERICAN GRAPEVINES 

The French vineyardists, of course, knew all about the 
possibilities of grafting one grapevine to another. They 
thought that if they could join the roots of the American 
vine and the tops of the French, they would have a com¬ 
bination which would defy the destroying insect and still 
produce the grapes to which they were accustomed. 

It took many years to work out this possibility, but in 
the end, after much experimentation, the American va¬ 
rieties of vines that would grow best under the conditions 
existing in various parts of France were found. The 
proper unions were made, and this strange situation came 
into actual being and exists today, not only throughout 
France but in many other European countries. 

The solution was brought to America. In the eastern 
states, where the European grapes had refused to grow, 
they could now be induced to do so by grafting them on 
the roots of native grapevines. 


81 


XLI 


THE BARBERRY BUSH IS AN OUTLAW 

I SN’T IT ODD that a tiny spore, riding on the wind, so 
small that it can be seen only with a microscope, costs 
the wheat growers of the Northwest $200,000,000 in a 
single season! 

Yet a spore did just this during the Great War. It was 
the spore of the black stem rust, which, when it has its 
way, blights the wheat crops of whole states. 

These spores are tiny plants that live on other plants. 
In the winter they live on straw that lies in the fields. 
When spring comes, they find it necessary to move if 
they are to prosper or even to live. Strange to say, there 
is but a single plant in all the world on which these spores 
can make springtime homes. Those plants are barberry 
bushes. Unless they find barberry bushes, they die. 

If they find these bushes, they thrive and multiply and, 
when summer comes and conditions are just right, they 
ride away again on the winds of the wheatfields, which 
are their happy hunting grounds. There they multiply 
so fast that they are very likely to blight crops of whole 
communities. 

This particular species of barberry is an ornamental 
plant used in yards and for hedges. It is familiar prac¬ 
tically all over Europe and America. It was not in 
America, however, before Europeans came. They intro¬ 
duced it. Not knowing the menace that lay back of it, 
settlers carried it west with them as they established their 
82 


THE BARBERRY BUSH IS AN OUTLAW 

homes. It came to be scattered from coast to coast. It 
got out of gardens and took to the woods and wild lands. 

It has become so firmly established as to be abundant in 
many places. 

When scientists showed the government the cycle of 
life of the black stem rust and the fact of its need of the * 
barberry bush, it was decided to try to do away with these 
bushes. If the country could get rid of them, it would be 
rid of black stem rust. 

The barberry bush was declared an outlaw. All men 
were urged to go forth and kill it. Intense campaigns for 
getting rid of it were carried on in many communities. 
Some progress has been made. But there are wild lands 
on which it is jungle thick. It is no small task to kill all 
these plants, root and branch. The method most often 
used is to pour salt at the base of a clump of bushes. Salt 
is poison to most plants. When the showers come and the 
salt melts and trickles down among the roots, they die. 
They have received the same treatment that the druggist 
gives the tree in front of his store when he empties the 
salt water out of an ice cream freezer and kills the tree 
without intending to do so. But there are so many 
clumps of barberry bushes that it may be a long time 
before the last of them are thus put to death. 


83 


XLII 


EVERGREENS ARE BUILT FOR FIGHTING 
STORMS 

I SN’T IT ODD that a certain family of trees, the pine 
and its relatives, have figured out a dozen schemes for 
defying wind and snow and have built themselves from 
stem to stern for that very purpose! 

Take, for example, the spruces, firs, cedars, cypresses, 
and junipers. Their leaves are needle-like or scale-like 
in form. They are polished as smooth as glass. No 
blustering wind can get hold of them. A tree full of them 
would be vastly safer in a storm than the same bulk of 
maple leaves. 

Most of the trees of the pine family are evergreens. 
They hold their leaves throughout the winter. In spite 
of the apparent handicap of winter foliage, the members 
of this family are likely to grow in the land of heavy 
snows and winter storms. 

If they had broad, flat leaves, the snow would pile upon 
them until they were broken down. But they present 
needles to these snows which sometimes fall to a depth 
of six feet. The flakes of snow slip off these needles, sift 
through them, and go on to the ground instead of weigh¬ 
ing down the branches of the trees. 

The very structure of the spruces and firs is a defiance 
to snow and wind. They send up a strong central column. 
It is likely to go straight as a lance to a great height. The 
limbs that adorn it are short and rugged. They do not 
84 


EVERGREENS BUILT FOR FIGHTING STORMS 

offer much of a place for the lodgment of snow, or long 
handles by which the wind can pull the tree this way and 
that. The longer limbs are low. This tree is usually 
shaped like a cone since the limbs become shorter and 
shorter from the base to the top. The top of a fir tree is 
very much different from the broad, spreading crown of 
an oak. It is hard to get hold of or to use as a loading 
place for snow. 

Thus built for resisting the severities of winter, the 
members of the pine tree family walk out on rocky cliffs 
fronting the sea and make homes for themselves. They 
climb up mountains above the place where the broad¬ 
leaved trees, even though they shed their foliage in win¬ 
ter, can survive, and there get along quite nicely. They 
seek homes far to the north, where summers are short and 
winters long and severe, and overrun an empire where it 
is beyond the possibility of other trees to compete with 
them for space. Because they have adapted themselves 
to this task of outwitting wind and winter, they have 
come into a world that is all their own. 



85 


XLIII 


THE OUTCAST FUNGI 

I SN’T IT ODD that the vegetable world has its outcast 
plants, which instinctively repel members of the hu¬ 
man family, just as do snakes or snails or spiders in the 
animal world! 

Yet it is true that mushrooms and their cousins of the 
fungus world, a cold and slimy lot, are generally shunned 
by man. 

These plants usually appear in the fall of the year or 
at other rainy seasons or in places where it is dripping 
wet and there is much decay upon which they may feed. 
They live by the death of other plants. They are pallid 
and bloated, suggesting death. They appear and disap¬ 
pear quickly and mysteriously. They are outcasts of the 
plant world, and a heritage of prejudice against them has 
come down through the ages. 

In days gone by the appearance in great numbers of 
mushrooms or toadstools or any of their kin was thought 
to prophesy a calamity. Often they did forecast plague, 
because the conditions that created them also caused ill¬ 
ness. Thus back in the Middle Ages there was a plague 
known as the Black Death. It came after Europe had 
suffered two months of unceasing rain. Crops rotted in 
the fields. The woods were blanketed with decaying 
leaves. Everywhere out of the dampness grew these 
fungus children of the dampness. They covered the 
world. They were credited with having brought the 
86 


THE OUTCAST FUNGI 

plague which seemed to have sprung from the water- 
soaked earth. 

As a matter of fact, many of these children of damp¬ 
ness and decay are poisonous. Children, through the 
ages, have been taught to shun them, that they are un¬ 
clean things. To be sure, there is often a ruffled beauty 
in their graceful parasols, and some kinds take on fan¬ 
tastic coloring. Certain varieties may be eaten, but such 
is the danger of death from getting the wrong sort that in 
European towns there is a public official whose duty it is 
to inspect mushrooms. 

These pale plants are the pariahs of the plant world. 
They have abandoned the green that is its usual trade¬ 
mark. They make no flower, which is the plant-world 
symbol of reproduction. There is an unwholesomeness 
about them that makes them avoided by man. 


87 


XLIV 


BANANAS ARE PICKED GREEN 

I SN’T IT ODD that bananas that ripen on the trees are 
not good! 

Most fruit is sweeter and better if it stays on the tree 
until it is dead ripe. But not the banana. It becomes flat 
in taste and of poor flavor. 

People who live in the tropics and have bananas grow¬ 
ing in their gardens do not let them ripen on the tree. 
They cut them when they are green and hang them up 
to mellow. 

It is a very fortunate thing that bananas need not 
ripen on the tree to be good. If they had to hang on the 
tree until they were ripe, they would not stand shipment. 
They would not last long enough to get to market with¬ 
out spoiling. 

Bananas are cut green. They are then hard and firm. 
The bunches can be piled one on top of another as high 
as a man’s head without being injured. This helps in 
getting them from the plantation to the banana ship and 
from the ship by rail to market everywhere. 

In the ship they can be kept cold by refrigeration to 
hold back their ripening. They must not be made too 
cold, however, or the flavor will be spoiled in that way. 
Finally, after they are in warehouses in the big cities, 
they are put into ripening rooms, where just the right 
amount of heat is let in to ripen them. 

Most of the bananas that come to market turn from 
88 


BANANAS ARE PICKED GREEN 

green to yellow as they ripen. To be sure, there are red 
bananas. They are of a breed that is a little different. 
They are thicker and shorter. They are very good ba¬ 
nanas, but the public, being used to yellow ones, refuses 
to buy them. So the red bananas are not often shipped. 
They stay in the tropics and go to waste. 

The green banana is made up largely of starch. As it 
gets ripe, the starch turns to sugar. It turns to sugar 
while the green on the outside is turning to yellow. A 
green banana tastes starchy. It is not a very good food. 

Many persons eat bananas before they are properly 
ripened. They should not be eaten until the first light 
green darkens. It is better still to wait until black spots 
begin to appear on the outside skin. Those who know 
bananas best wait even until the whole outside has turned 
black. It is then that they are at their best. Bananas 
that are partly black are the proper ones to select for 
eating. 


89 


XLV 


TREES INVENTED AIRPLANES 

I SN’T IT ODD that trees invented airplanes long be¬ 
fore man did! 

These airplanes are usually of the glider type, riding 
long distances on the wind without the use of power to 
drive them. 

The seed of the willow tree, for example, is so tiny that 
it can hardly be seen as it rides by on the wind, supported 
by a fluffy parachute and bearing a germ of life that may 
grow into a huge tree. 

The cottonwood tree, that borders the streams of the 
West and often furnishes shade for the settlers on the 
plains, is really a variety of poplar. Its seeds are put up 
in little pods, which burst open and release them with 
many tiny fibers attached, suggesting cotton. Sometimes 
the air is so full of these floating seeds that they become 
a nuisance. But the seeds get themselves broadcast for 
planting. 

The maple seeds spread wings which often grow to¬ 
gether in pairs for all the world like those of a bird, and 
the mother tree trusts to the wind to carry its babies away 
to a cradle that will hold them while they grow. The 
elm, the birch, and the ash launch ships that ride the 
wind. 

Many of these trees have their natural homes along the 
courses of streams. The streams are usually low at the 
time the seeds are taking flight. The seeds scatter them- 
90 


TREES INVENTED AIRPLANES 

selves all about river bottoms, nestle in the grass, catch in 
the drifts, and get buried in the sand. 

The idea of the mother tree in putting wings on her 
seeds is that they may escape the shade that she herself 
makes and find less crowded conditions far away. Wise 
as this device is, it results in sending nearly all these 
tree children away on quite fruitless journeys. For one 
tree seed that lives and grows to lift its crest to the sky, 
millions perish. 

The willow or cottonwood tree, for example, gives mil¬ 
lions of seeds to the winds every year. If one per cent of 
these seeds grew to be trees, they would overrun the 
world. The death rate is high among tree babies. Na¬ 
ture is anything but economical when she sets about 
planting her crops. 



91 








XLVI 


APPLE TREES GO CRAZY 

I SN’T IT ODD that an apple tree planted in Florida 
goes crazy! 

Many apple trees have been planted there, and the re¬ 
port on their actions leads to the conclusion that they 
invariably become nervous wrecks, quite incapable of 
normal action. 

The apple tree is a child of the North. Its natural home 
is among the snows. Through the ages it has been accus¬ 
tomed to long periods of inaction, standing leafless 
through the winter months. 

When the tree is transplanted to the South, this plan 
is upset. No cold comes in the autumn to nip its leaves 
and put it to sleep. It keeps on putting forth leaves, try¬ 
ing to become an evergreen like the orange. But it misses 
its sleep and so begins to act queerly. 

It blooms fitfully at all seasons of the year. This south¬ 
ern climate has caused it to forget the regular routine of 
its life. It may set fruit, but it does not know when 
to ripen it. This fruit is likely to drop at unexpected 
times. 

When northern varieties of apples are brought but a 
little south of their normal home, they lose their hardi¬ 
ness. Apples that are crisp and firm and have good keep¬ 
ing qualities in New York State lose their vigor when they 
are grown in Virginia. Often they begin decaying before 
they fall from the tree. Successful crops can be raised in 
92 


APPLE TREES GO CRAZY 

the different belts only from varieties that are especially 
adapted to those belts. 

The northern tree taken far south wastes its strength in 
trying to become an evergreen, in its uncertain blooming, 
and in its loss of sleep. Its very appearance begins to 
take on a look of torture. It may worry along miserably 
for a few years with shattered nerves. But gradually it 
pines away and dies. 

How different is the rugged, gnarled, ancient apple tree 
of the northern orchard. Sturdily it stands on the hill¬ 
side, defying the elements. It may have stood there for 
a hundred or even two hundred years, for the apple tree 
is long-lived among plants. It is invigorated by northern 
blasts. It is hardened by those periods of sleep that come 
each winter. The soft life of the South is not for this 
robust provider of man’s most common fruit. 


93 


XLVII 


THE FRUITS OF PALMS 

I SN’T IT ODD that two palm trees so nearly alike as 
the date and the cocoanut yield fruits which are so 
different! 

The trees that bear these two fruits are not merely 
palms, but they are both members of the feather-palm 
branch of the palm family, as opposed to the fan-palm 
branch. As a matter of fact, there was probably a time 
when these two trees were one and the same, and the 
difference in the fruit they bear has probably come about 
because of the differences in the ways in which they have 
lived. 

The native home of the date palm is believed to have 
been along the Euphrates River in Arabia and in the 
fertile oases of the deserts thereabouts. There dates 
have grown for hundreds of thousands of years. The 
most important problem that faces any plant is carrying 
itself on to the next generation. Whatever the conditions 
are under which it lives, it must produce seeds that will 
get themselves planted and grow new generations of their 
kind, or it will die out. 

The palm, growing in the desert, found that it could 
best serve this purpose by producing small seeds and put¬ 
ting sweet meat about them. This would induce animals, 
birds, man himself to carry the fruit away and eat it. 
The seed would be thrown down and have a chance of 
taking root and growing. The date, in fact, followed the 
94 


THE FRUITS OF PALMS 

program of many of the fruits — that of offering a bribe 
to whoever would carry its seed away. 

The cocoanut palm, growing on a sandy beach of a 
South Pacific island, faced a different problem. It 
wanted to get its seed away from where it stood to some 
other sandy beach where there would be more room for 
it to grow. 

It used to be the theory that the cocoanut palm de¬ 
pended on the waves and ocean currents to broadcast its 
seed, and that it was because of this that it developed its 
fruit into a great, hollow sphere with a light-weight husk 
about it that would float readily. 

This theory seems of late to have been disproved. 
Some one put cocoanuts in salt water, kept them there 
for given lengths of time, tested them, and found that 
they would not grow. The theory most generally ac¬ 
cepted now is that the cocoanut has made itself accept¬ 
able as food to the South Sea Islander, who has carried it 
with him wherever he has gone and thus spread it. 

At any rate, these trees are widely scattered through 
the tropics. Multitudes of them yield each one hundred 
nuts a year to man, who has built upon them the great 
copra-producing industry of the world. This copra, the 
dried meat inside the nut, finds its way into cocoanut 
candy and the frosting of cakes all around the world. 
Much more important commercially is cocoanut oil, 
which is the fat pressed from copra. This oil has many 
uses, one of which is that of being a butter substitute. 


95 


XLVIII 


THE EASTER LILY’S DESERT COUSIN 

I SN'T IT ODD that the lily, 
which one is likely to think 
of as having its natural home 
in damp places, and which 
gives the impression of being 
a marsh child, grows out on 
the open deserts of the South¬ 
west, where every plant that 
lives must carry on a constant warfare against death from 
lack of water! 

It is in these open spaces that the yucca grows and at 
blossom time gives to these barren solitudes such a cluster 
of flowers as are produced by no other member of the 
lily family under the sun. Strangely, another yucca, 
much like this Westerner, finds itself a home on the At¬ 
lantic seaboard. 

There are many sorts of lilies in the world, ranging 
from the Madonna lily of the Easter season to the tiny 
lily-of-the-valley, from the deep yellow Turk’s cap that 
borders the roadways from New York to Boston to the 
leopard lily of California’s valleys, from the yellow trout 
lily by the brookside to the snow white Solomon’s seal 
that hangs its bells of purity all along its stem. 

But the queen of them all is the bloom of the yucca. 
It is shown to be a lily by the nature of its pointed leaves 
and by the construction of its six-petaled flowers. The 
96 




THE EASTER LILY’S DESERT COUSIN 

various trade-marks of the lily family are written all 
over it. 

Yet there in the desert it grows differently from other 
lilies. Its cousins are small plants whose tops die down 
in the winter time. But the yucca converts its leaves 
into many daggers that make it a plant hedgehog, diffi¬ 
cult to attack. These may sit flat on the ground or, in 
some varieties, may cluster at the top of a stalk as high as 
a man on horseback. They may be almost tree-like and 
go on living for many years. 

Then at blossom time there emerges from this rosette 
of dagger-tipped leaves a tall stalk that may reach ten 
or twenty feet into the desert sunshine. Having got its 
growth, this stalk puts forth a cluster of buds as big as a 
bushel basket. Time opens up these buds, and the re¬ 
sult is a group of bell-like lilies, strangely like magnified 
specimens of Solomon’s seal and richly perfumed like that 
other tiny cousin, the lily-of-the-valley. But such a clus¬ 
ter of these lilies it is that the yucca yields! Any single 
bloom would win it a place of distinction as a producer of 
lilies, but it groups scores of its flowers together as though 
it were expecting some great giantess to come that way 
to gather herself a party bouquet. 


97 


XLIX 


THE STEPMOTHER TREE 

I SN’T IT ODD that man can persuade a strong, vigor¬ 
ous plant, with roots in the ground that it has taken 
years to develop, to adopt a spindling little seedling and 
to transfer all its vigor to its foster child! 

Here is the way it is done. A vigorous peach tree may 
be growing in the orchard. It is four years old, but pro¬ 
duces very ordinary peaches. Its owner, however, was 
last year traveling in the West, and when his train 
stopped at some way station, he bought a basket of 
peaches. They were the best peaches he had ever eaten; 
so he saved the seeds. He planted them, and the next 
summer they were growing slowly, as delicate little plants. 
This man knew that it would take six or eight years be¬ 
fore these plants would come into bearing. 

So he decided to give them stepmothers to help them 
along. He took one of them up with a ball of dirt about its 
roots. He went to the four-year-old peach tree and 
scraped out a little trough in its bark; he also scraped the 
outer bark from the side of the tiny seedling. Then he 
bound the wounds in these two plants firmly together. 

The older tree was getting plenty of food from its roots. 
The seedling was getting enough from its ball of dirt to 
keep it going for a while. But the trees grew together 
at the wound. Presently the seedling began to draw on 
the older tree for food. In the end it got all its vitality 
from this source. It began to grow faster than it would 
98 


THE STEPMOTHER TREE 

have grown if it had depended on its own roots. Finally 
the roots of the young seedling were cut off. Later the 
top of the old tree was cut off. This turned all the vigor 
of the four-year-old tree into the seedling. It grew as 
such a young plant had never grown before. In the sec¬ 
ond year, so full of vigor was it that it bore fruit. The 
owner of the orchard got some of his choice peaches in 
two years instead of six. 

This use of the stepmother tree has proved a great help 
to scientists who have been experimenting with the de¬ 
velopment of new fruits. A scientist may cross one sort 
of plum with another. He is hoping that he may develop 
a better plum. Or he may cross an orange with a grape¬ 
fruit, this being possible since these plants are closely 
related. He is most anxious to know what will result 
from the crossing. At best he may have to wait through 
tedious years. Then, to develop a superior fruit, he may 
have to again select certain plants, cross them, and wait 
for results. 

By using the stepmother tree in such experiments the 
scientist can hurry nature. He can reduce, from six years 
to two, the time he will have to wait between the different 
stages of the experiment. Thus is the tedium of such ex¬ 
periments lessened and the likelihood increased that the 
experiments will be carried through to final results. 


99 


L 


DO CHOLLAS JUMP? 

I SN’T IT ODD that the people of the Southwest hold 
to the theory that the cholla has the power to move 
quickly, and therefore persist in calling it the jumping 
cholla! 

The sahuaro tends to have a single upright column. 
The prickly pear is like a bush, with many branches which 
are built up of links of its thick, lobe-like leaves. The 
cholla goes a little further than the prickly pear toward 
being a low, sprawling tree of many branches. 

The cholla is like its cousin, the prickly pear, in that it 
adds to its stature joint by joint. Instead of flat leaves, 
however, the joints are round and thickly covered with 
thorns that point in every direction. These thorns 
are unbelievably sharp and are bearded like fishhooks 
so that, once they get into anything, they are hard to 
detach. 

There is a reason for this arrangement: the cholla has 
a way all its own of getting itself planted. Think, for a 
moment, of this branching cholla that has got itself es¬ 
tablished there on the edge of the plain. It has grown 
until it is as big as an automobile. All its outer fringes 
are covered with these thorny balls. Along comes one of 
those white-faced cows of the range, browsing on the 
needle grass about its roots. She reaches too far beneath 
this thorny bush and barely touches one of its thorn balls. 
One of its spines does its duty. The cow flinches and 
100 


DO CHOLLAS JUMP? 

backs away. She carries with her not only the thorn that 
has pricked her but the whole ball to which it is attached. 

The cow may try to rub the thorn ball off her side with 
her nose. Other thorns in it will attack her nose, and the 
whole ball may go with them. If she rubs her nose on 
her leg, the ball may attach itself to that member. In 
one way or another it will hold on so tightly at one place 
or the other that it is likely to ride with her for a long 
time and for great distances. 

These cholla balls are so lightly attached to the parent 
stem that they become loosened at the slightest touch. 
So readily do they leave it that many people of the West 
believe that they turn loose before they are touched, that 
they actually leap to meet the man or beast that ap¬ 
proaches them. This is not actually a fact. They must 
be touched before they can take hold. But because it 
seems to be a fact they are called jumping chollas. 

These bundles of thorns get themselves planted 
through this habit of sticking to animals that brush 
against them. This ball of thorns that attaches itself to 
the grazing cow eventually leaves her. It is still a living 
branch of the cholla and, when it settles down, is likely 
to send forth a root that will attach itself to the ground. 
Thus is it planted. From it will grow another sprawling, 
dwarfish, thorny tree of the waste places. It gets itself 
broadcast through its joints and its thorns, which it uses 
as grappling hooks that it may steal rides. 


101 


LI 


DATE GROVES 

I SN'T IT ODD that one date tree may be a male and 
bear no fruit, while another is a female and, by pro¬ 
ducing seeds in fruit, bears children to carry on the race! 

When Westerners first thought of growing dates instead 
of bringing them all the way from Arabia, they planted 
seeds and waited for them to develop into trees. No dif¬ 
ference in the plants appeared until they were old enough 
to bloom. Then, strangely, half of them put forth one 
sort of bloom, and half another. It was found that those 
with the modest little buds with almost no petals were on 
female trees, and the more ambitious blooms were on 
male trees. The female flowers bore fruit, and the male 
flowers did not. 

These male trees, since they bore no fruit, seemed to 
take up much room which yielded no profit. It seemed 
logical that they should all be cut down and female trees 
put in their places. Where this was done, however, an¬ 
other curious situation arose. The female trees at once 
ceased to bear fruit. 

The date-growers, knowing something of the secrets of 
the plant world, realized that the blooms of the female 
trees must be fertilized with pollen from the male trees 
or they would not bear fruit. In spite of the fact that 
they yielded no fruit, male trees must be grown in date 
orchards. The problem to work out was that of keeping 
enough of them to fertilize the fruit-bearers without at 
102 


DATE GROVES 


the same time giving more space in the orchard to them 
than was necessary. 

Where these trees grow in the native state, with an 
equal number of male and female trees, the male blossoms 
shake out their pollen, which floats on the wind in such 
quantities that some of it reaches every female flower. 
The problem was to reduce the number of male trees as 
much as possible and still have enough pollen to go 
around. 

The manner in which this could be done had been 
worked out five thousand years earlier by the Arabs, 
which shows that something was known of natural his¬ 
tory even as long ago at that. The practice in the various 
countries had been to plant one male tree to every fifty 
or one hundred female trees. Date flowers appear in 
groups much like tassels of corn. There are many sprigs 
to a single tassel. 

The Arabs divided these tassels up into individual 
twigs. Then they would climb the productive trees and 
tie one of these sprigs to each opening cluster of female 
blooms. This sprig, bound in this way closely to the 
female cluster, would thoroughly fertilize it. Wherever 
dates are grown commercially, such twigs are carried to 
the clusters of productive flowers. 


103 


LII 


FIRE INSURANCE FOR TREES 

I SN’T IT ODD that trees carry fire insurance, that they 
really do prepare to meet such emergencies as the loss 
of all their leaves by fire or otherwise! 

Trees, of course, cannot live very long without leaves. 
A fire through the woods might sear all their leaves but 
might not be severe enough to kill their trunks or limbs. 
Caterpillars might devour the leaves but might not in¬ 
jure the branches. 

The trees have buds which they hold in reserve for 
years awaiting just such times as these. When this sort 
of thing happens, these buds rush new leaves quickly to 
the rescue. 

When a new twig grows on a tree, it has leaves arranged 
along it at regular spaces, depending on what sort of twig 
it is. When these leaves fall off, there are scars on the 
twigs to show where they grew. 

Just above every one of these leaf scars is a bud for 
other leaves or another twig that may come later. As a 
twig grows older and branches out, every branch comes 
from an old leaf scar. One can tell from these scars just 
where the new twigs will grow. 

But twigs do not spring from every leaf scar. The 
buds lie ready beneath the bark but they do not develop. 
They are held in reserve. They are the insurance policy 
of the tree. 

It is the nature of trees to get their leaves in the spring. 
104 


FIRE INSURANCE FOR TREES 

They may put on new growth at their tips at other times, 
but the robe of leaves comes at the beginning of the 
summer. 

But when fire, insects, or other calamity comes late in 
the season, and the tree is stripped of its leaves, only un¬ 
usual measures can save its life. It must rush its reserve 
buds into new leaves and twigs. It must awaken these 
sleepers that have been drowsing through the seasons. 
It does just this. The reserve leaves come forth and save 
the life of the tree. 


105 


LIII 


THE LION’S TOOTH 

I SN’T IT ODD that the humble dandelion, hugging 
the earth, is one of the most efficient of all living crea¬ 
tures and one that is constantly extending its domain! 

Whoever has a lawn is likely to know the dandelion. 
It has traveled around the world and established itself in 
every nook and cranny. Examining the plant on that 
lawn, one finds a rosette of sturdy leaves flat on the 
ground. The lawnmower runs over it and does no harm. 
Man or beast may trample it to no avail. If it is cut off, 
it will grow again. Come rain, come drought, it survives. 
Upon examination its roots are found to be big, strong, 
and deep. They are able to dispute possession of the soil 
with all comers. 

The dandelion makes itself obnoxious to grazing ani¬ 
mals; so they do not eat it. If it is chopped off every 
month of the spring and summer, it will grow again. 
Sometime before frost it is likely to find a chance to burst 
into its yellow bloom and ripen seed. 

When its seeds appear, it does not have to depend upon 
any one for planting as does the apple upon the fancy of 
the boy who throws away the core. It does not need to 
coax the squirrel to bury it as the acorn does. The dande¬ 
lion puts wings on its seeds, and they ride away on the 
winds to new homes. 

The white globe of dandelion seeds is little less beauti¬ 
ful against its background of green than the yellow flower 
106 


THE LION’S TOOTH 


itself. Many a child has plucked a stem bearing one of 
these globes, held it high, and exploded it with a puff of 
his breath. When he does so, a hundred seeds have been 
released that will scatter far, and each bear the chance of 
starting a new plant. The foot of a cow, hitting this 
globe, may start these seeds traveling. A mere puff of 
wind may do it. In one way or another the chance of their 
being planted is most excellent. 

There is efficiency from cradle to the grave for the 
dandelion. Dent de lion was its name in the begin¬ 
ning, which means “ tooth of the lion ” — a stern name, 
but not a misfit when the real character of this plant is 
known. 



107 


LIV 


THE CORN SILK’S PURPOSE 

I SN'T IT ODD that the “ silk ” which grows out of the 
tip of a young ear of corn is a lifeline which saves 
its very existence! 

Not many people have ever thought of this silk as play¬ 
ing a role of vital usefulness. Not many people know 
that each strand of this silk is tied to the cob at the point 
where a grain of corn is destined to appear. Every grain 
must have its silk, or it cannot grow. This silk must serve 
a very peculiar purpose, or the grain will not develop. 

The tassel at the top of the cornstalk has to do with 
this purpose. The tassel contains the male flower of the 
corn, and like other flowers, it produces a fine, dust-like 
pollen. This also is vital to the development of the grain 
of corn. 

The corn tassel is likely to choose the quiet of some 
early morning to shake out its particles of pollen. They 
float down through the quiet air. Each of those silken 
threads that is tied to a grain of corn is waiting for a 
particle of this pollen. With pollen shaking down from 
all the tassels in the cornfield, it seldom fails of its pur¬ 
pose. This tiny particle of pollen fertilizes the grain and 
causes it to grow. 

No sooner has the silk served this purpose than it 
withers and dies. Those who have experimented with 
corn have played various jokes on these downy bits of 
silken thread. They have, for instance, put a paper bag 

108 


THE CORN SILK’S PURPOSE 

over the young ear of corn. The silk was thus prevented 
from getting its pollen. It did not wither and die like its 
neighbor on an ear that was not covered. It kept on 
growing in the hope of serving its purpose. It might 
grow for ten days after its neighbor had died. It might 
grow a foot long in its effort to find its way to the open 
where pollen was to be had. 

In the end it would have to give up, and the cob which 
sent it forth would produce no corn. Or half the silk 
might be covered so that it could not get pollen, and half 
left outside the bag. The enclosed half would keep on 
hopefully growing after the other had served its purpose 
and died. But only half of the grains on the cob would 
develop. Many of the defective ears of corn that come to 
the table have had trouble with these silken hands they 
have sent out for pollen grains. 


109 


LV 


THE ROSE OF JERICHO 

I SN’T IT ODD that there 
are plants in the world 
that can get up and go travel¬ 
ing, roll about joyously until 
they find the sort of comfort¬ 
able homes they have been 
looking for, and then settle 
down again to lives of quiet! 
The most remarkable of such plants is the rose of Jeri¬ 
cho, also called the resurrection plant, often referred to 
in the Bible. It grows in the desert country of the Near 
East, in Arabia, and in the Holy Land. It is a child of the 
dry lands, and its habit of traveling seems to have grown 
out of the needs of the hard life of this region. 

The rose of Jericho seems a tender, fragile thing, there 
in its desert home, growing rapidly after one of the infre¬ 
quent rains. Then the season comes when there is no 
moisture in the soil where its roots are planted. Its 
branches become dry and brown. They curl up in such a 
way as to make the bush a quite round ball. The sun 
drinks the moisture out of the whole plant until it has 
the appearance of being quite dead. It becomes a light 
and airy thing of little weight. The roots lose their hold 
on the dry sand. 

Then along comes a gust of wind and the rose of Jericho 
starts on its travels. So light is it that it rolls away across 

110 



THE ROSE OF JERICHO 

the plain with the slightest urging. If the wind is stiff 
and strong and nothing intervenes, it may travel great 
distances. 

As a matter of fact, this plant is still a living thing and 
is looking for a new home. What it wants is a home with 
water in the basement. If it should happen to be blown 
into a region which knows moisture, into a lowland where 
damp soil invites, it is likely to cease its wanderings. 
This is the thing for which it has been looking, and here 
it will settle down. 

The dry roots of the rose of Jericho unfurl themselves. 
They thirstily take hold of the damp soil. They drink 
of its moisture and send it coursing up through the plant. 
Its dry branches come to life. They uncoil themselves, 
cease to be a sphere, and reach out as might those of any 
other plant. They again become delicate green. All 
trace of the hard, dry ball has gone. Yet this is the plant 
pilgrim, apparently lifeless, which but yesterday was 
hurtling before the wind of the desert. 


Ill 


LVI 


PLANTS THAT BURY NUTS 

I SN'T IT ODD that certain plants outdo the squirrel 
in burying nuts against the time of need! 

Take the peanut, for instance. The fact that it is for 
sale at baseball games is due to the habit of the plant that 
bears it — a member of the bean family — of burying its 
fruits. 

The peanut plant is a bushy growth that looks much 
like clover and has yellow blossoms. It grows as clover 
might, until these blossoms fall off. Then it does a 
strange thing. It sends each of these low branches down¬ 
ward until it touches the ground. They do not stop there, 
but bore into the earth. Sometimes a branch tip digs in 
to a depth of three or four inches. 

After hiding away in this manner, the tips where the 
flowers bloomed begin to develop pods. Safe beneath the 
ground these pods grow until they become the peanuts of 
commerce. 

This business of assuring seed for a future crop is very 
important to plants. There is a certain wild bean of this 
group, known as the “ hog peanut/' that takes the trouble 
to develop one crop of seed beneath the ground and an¬ 
other on its branches. The underground crop assures 
next year’s growth on the old homesite, while the beans 
in the branches have a chance to pioneer a bit and start 
colonies far afield. 

There are other plants with underground branches that 
112 


PLANTS THAT BURY NUTS 

bloom out of sight and make seeds. The fringed polygala 
has underground flowers as well as brilliant blossoms out 
where everybody can see them. Then there is the plant 
which old-fashioned people call “ sow bread,” which is 
another buried seed. The branches of this plant bore into 
the ground to bury their nuts in a place of safety. 

All these plants, it may be, feel a scornful contempt 
for the sunflower, the sheaf of wheat, the stalk of corn, 
which leave their seed out in the open for every passing 
bird to peck at. 


113 


LVII 


ORCHARDS WITH TWO CLIMATES 

I SN’T IT ODD that a man may own a forty-acre tract 
of land and, by planting apples on it, find that part of 
it is in one climate and part in another! 

When these trees have grown up and arrived at the 
time for bearing fruit, the farmer may find that those in 
one part of the orchard bloom ten days earlier in the 
spring than do those in another part. I have actually seen 
such an orchard, part in full bloom and part without a 
single flower. 

Careful study has shown that this is a matter not of 
soil but of climate. There may be climatic differences in 
a single orchard that are as marked as though one part of 
it were five hundred miles farther north than the other. 

Part of such an orchard would run up the gentle slope 
of a hill. The other would lie in the hollow. The trees 
on the hill would bloom earlier than the others. The 
climate there is milder than it is in the hollow. 

There is a peculiar reason for this. The reason is that 
the trees on the hillside have “ air drainage.” Those in 
the hollow have not. 

It is well known that cold air is heavier than warm air. 
The cold air that gets into a room in the winter time 
settles near the floor. The warm air tends to rise to the 
ceiling. 

So it is with this orchard. The cold air of spring settles 
in the low places. The low parts of this two-climate or- 
114 


ORCHARDS WITH TWO CLIMATES 

chard form a basin that holds cold air. There is no air 
drainage out of this basin. On the hillside there is a cir¬ 
culation of air. The air which these trees get is of warm¬ 
ing spring quality. The trees in the hollow are held back 
by the cold air of the basin in which they dwell. Those 
on the hillside feel spring earlier. So there is a week or 
ten days’ difference in the time of blooming. 

The success of a crop may depend on this difference of 
a week or two in the spring start. In planting an or¬ 
chard, these factors should be taken into consideration, 
and the land should be studied from the standpoint of 
air drainage. 

Lower lands may not be colder than near-by hills. If 
they have air drainage they may be just as warm. But 
basins that hold the air, as lakes hold water, are cold. 

Bodies of adjacent water, such as lakes, may have a 
warming effect on climate. When cold spells come that 
might otherwise injure fruit, these bodies of water, which 
are warmer than the air roundabout, keep up the tem¬ 
perature. 


115 


LVIII 


FUNGI HAVE NO FLOWERS 

I SN’T IT ODD that there is one whole division of the 
plant world that breaks away from the practice of 
the great majority and fails to flower and make seed! 

The fungi, of which the toadstool is a familiar example, 
are a flowerless group. They are a very low order of 
plants. Their position in the plant world is about like 
that of the snail in the animal world. 

The mushroom on the ground, the slime on a rotten 
log, the mold on the side of an orange, each is a fungus, a 
growing plant. But these do not bloom. The mushroom 
lives its moist life and dries out. If its dry tent is hit 
with a stick, a cloud of snuff-like dust fills the air. 

This snuff has been developing among the ruffles of its 
under side. The microscopic particles of it are called 
spores. A spore plays the part of a seed for the fungus 
plant. 

Other fungus plants have other methods of developing 
their spores. Apple rust, for example, is a fungus. It 
develops on cedar trees in the swollen ball-like growths 
that appear on their branches. These cedar balls finally 
burst open, and spores float away on the air. The tiny 
mildew develops a spore of this sort, to ride away on the 
wind and develop other mildew. 

These spores of the non-flowering plants are so numer¬ 
ous that they seem to be everywhere. Whenever damp 
weather comes, mushrooms spring up in every pile of de- 
116 


FUNGI HAVE NO FLOWERS 

caying vegetation. Wherever a fruit packer breaks the 
air-tight skin of an apple, spores get in, fungi grow, and 
decay begins. 

The development from low forms of plants like slime 
molds to seaweed, mosses, and finally to ferns, which are 
the highest form of non-flowering plants, is most interest¬ 
ing. There is much surmise as to the ladder these plants 
climbed in their development. They grew to differ in 
different surroundings, just as lowland plants differ from 
those up on the mountain side. At any rate, their devel¬ 
opment presents an interesting contrast to that of other 
plants that have learned to bear flowers and seed. 



117 


LIX 


PLANTS THAT LIVE ON OTHER PLANTS 

I SN'T IT ODD that nearly all the plants of the world 
make sugar and live upon it, while the mushroom 
breed makes none at all and still gets along quite well! 

These sugar-makers get their food largely out of the 
carbon dioxide of the air. It is known that the green of 
their leaves is necessary to sugar-making. Most plants 
must spread the green of their leaves to the sun, or they 
will starve to death. 

Now come the members of the mushroom or fungus 
family, that have no green in their makeup. They form 
a pale and sallow group that lives as well in the shade as 
in the sunshine. 

Yet these fungus plants require the same sort of food 
to build themselves up as do the green, flowering families. 
They need starchy foods and salts from the earth. They 
do not make this food for themselves but steal it from 
other plants while they are living or devour their remains 
after they are dead. 

They are in this respect like the animals which live 
upon vegetation or upon other animals that eat it. So 
do they in turn depend on the plant food that the green 
leaves make when they sit out in the sun. These green 
leaves, in fact, are the basic food factories for the living 
world. 

The fungus group of plants, not having to make their 
own food, have not needed to develop complicated struc- 
118 


PLANTS THAT LIVE ON OTHER PLANTS 

tures. They have not developed as have the plants that 
have had to manufacture their own food. The fungus 
plants, therefore, are without the complicated root sys¬ 
tems, stem and branching systems, flowers and leaves that 
are vital to other plants. 

Most of these fungi attack only those plants that are 
dead or dead parts of plants, causing them to go to pieces 
and disappear. Some of them, on the other hand, may 
set upon living plants and destroy them. Those that at¬ 
tack dead plant products are useful to man when the 
objects attacked are not serving his purposes. 

The fungus secretes ferments which so act upon the 
wood as to cause it to dissolve and be drunk up by the 
guest. Finally only a powder is left which goes back to 
the soil. But when this same fungus attacks the logs of 
which the barn is built or railroad ties and converts them 
into powder, the matter assumes a different aspect. 


119 


LX 


THE CURE FOR IVY POISONING 

I SN’T IT ODD that the poison that is injected by the 
rattlesnake when it strikes yields to the same treat¬ 
ment that is used for the venom rubbed on by poison ivy 
when one brushes against it in the woods! 

After many years of study the reptile specialists of the 
National Museum have come to the conclusion that the 
best cure for rattlesnake bite is potassium permanganate. 
This is a very ordinary drug that can be bought almost 
anywhere. It comes in the form of crystals. If these 
crystals can be rubbed into the snake-bite wound, they 
make certain chemical combinations with the poison, thus 
forming new substances that are harmless. The poison 
is neutralized. 

Man, in America, finds that he has a poison plant that 
is less deadly than the snake that injects its venom, but 
much more evil in the total amount of misery it causes. 
Poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac, which are 
closely related, exist in America, but nowhere else in the 
world. Their game is to secrete an oily sort of substance 
and to distribute it all over themselves, thus having it 
always ready for use. It is always on the outside, ready to 
make a smear on the hand of man. Or it may make a 
smear on his shoe or on his leggings, and that night, when 
he undresses, he may get this oil on his hands and from 
them to his face. 

In a few hours or days he begins to itch. Inflammation 
120 


THE CURE FOR IVY POISONING 

follows, then blisters, then scabs. He is likely to have a 
very unpleasant time. People have even been known to 
die from poison ivy. 

It is here again that potassium permanganate comes to 
the rescue. Five parts of it to ninety-five parts of water 
make a dark purple liquid that may be used as a wash. 
Dabbing this on the affected parts with absorbent cotton 
or a soft bit of cloth is the method of treatment. 

The government, through its Department of Agricul¬ 
ture, makes this recommendation in a publication on the 
treatment of poison ivy. It warns that salves are likely 
to do more harm than good by helping to spread the 
poison. Even in the treatment with permanganate there 
should be no rubbing, for this distributes the poison. But 
if the affected spots are dabbed gradually, the drug reaches 
more and more of the poison, unites with it in new and 
harmless combinations, and the trouble disappears. 


121 


LXI 


THE MORNING-GLORY FAMILY 

I SN’T IT ODD that so few 
of us ever stop to think of 
the remarkable resemblance 
between two vines that we 
have known all our lives and 
to wonder what that resem¬ 
blance means! 

The sweet-potato vine and 
the morning-glory vine, if examined carefully, will be 
found to be very closely alike. The one grows out in the 
vegetable garden and makes the production of food on 
its roots its chief business, and the other grows over the 
back fence and contributes its blossoms to the beauty of 
the world in the early morning. These two purposes are 
far apart, but the leaves and the vines of the two plants 
are much alike. 

They are, in fact, cousins. They are the principal 
members of the morning-glory family. They still look 
alike, as is the way of kinsfolk, but they have lived such 
different lives that each is without the chief trait that has 
come to mark the other. 

The thing of importance about the sweet potato, for 
example, is the fact that it puts up, at its roots, a neat 
package that man has learned to use as a food. Cousin 
Morning-Glory serves no such useful purpose. 

The thing of importance about the morning-glory is 
122 



THE MORNING-GLORY FAMILY 

the fact that it bursts into flower with the appearance of 
the sun and converts the back fence into a tapestry of 
brilliant bloom. Cousin Sweet Potato, on the other hand, 
rarely shows any flower at all. 

At some time in the past these two plants were doubt¬ 
less one and the same. That which was to become the 
sweet potato found itself living under conditions that 
made it hard for it to bloom, to make seed, and so to keep 
its kind alive. Throughout Nature there are many ex¬ 
amples of marvels that are performed that animals or 
plants may survive. This plant learned to lay up stores 
of food in its roots and to grow new plants from them 
rather than from seeds. Having done this, it found it 
no longer necessary to bloom. It stopped doing so. Yet 
sometimes a potato grower will find that one of his vines 
has put forth a flower. That flower is strangely like the 
bloom of a morning-glory. 

The morning-glory makes no potatoes and stores no 
food at its roots. It produces an abundance of seeds and 
has always lived under conditions where these were quite 
sufficient to keep it going. It has found its place in the 
world, as has its cousin. It contributes beauty, while its 
cousin provides food. If it could speak it would perhaps 
express scorn for its relative in the greengrocery busi¬ 
ness, and this practical member of the family doubtless 
would answer in kind and brand its cousin a mere idler, 
given only to fancy-colored apparel. 


123 


LXII 


NUT CAMOUFLAGE 

I SN'T IT ODD that there is a vital, life-and-death 
reason back of the fact that nuts are green when they 
are hanging on the tree but turn brown when the time 
comes to fall off! 

The green, one may observe, matches the leaves among 
which they hang, but the brown is like those that are 
dead and lie on the ground. In each situation the nut is 
raising a color scheme that will help it to hide. 

Some nuts have bitter hulls, and some have prickly 
hulls which often save them from being cracked. Round 
nuts can roll far and so find new spots for growing. 
Woody nuts may float far away in search of new homes. 

Nuts may escape many enemies, but not the squirrel. 
Yet this squirrel, seeming to be the worst enemy of the 
nut-bearing trees because he eats their fruit all the time, 
is really their best friend. He gathers nuts in the autumn, 
digs neat holes in the ground in which to hide them, and 
forgets to go back for many of them, which, in the spring, 
find themselves neatly planted for growing. 

The trees put meat in their nuts for two purposes. 
One is that they may induce animals to carry them away 
so that they may start in a new home. This pays them in 
the case of the squirrel, but when hogs come into the woods 
in the autumn to fatten on the mast, they eat many 
acorns and help not at all in the planting. The service 
of the squirrel, however, which would not be rendered but 
124 


NUT CAMOUFLAGE 


for the meat in the nut, is so great as to make up for all 
the losses. There is much doubt, in fact, if the nut¬ 
bearing trees would survive if it were not for the squirrels. 

The second purpose of the meat in the acorn is that of 
supplying food for the tiny plant when it first starts. 
When its leaves first appear, it must have materials for 
growth. These it can draw from the stores in the acorn 
before its roots get themselves planted in the ground and 
begin to draw from it. The plant in its early days would 
not fare so well if there were no food stored up for it. 
When those days are past, it is found that the meat of 
the acorn or nut has all been used. 


125 


LXIII 


WATERMELONS FROM AFRICA 

I SN’T IT ODD that the traveler to interior Africa finds 
watermelons growing wild and covering wide areas! 
Far back in the dark continent, in the regions near the 
equator, is the native home of the watermelon. Like its 
gourd cousins it is a tropical vine. When Livingstone, the 
explorer, first went into Africa, he was surprised to find 
these boundless watermelon patches. He was interested 
to see that natives from considerable distances gathered 
about them and feasted on their fruit. Many of the ani¬ 
mals of the wild, also, depended upon these melons as an 
important item of diet. 

But there was one strange thing about these wild 
watermelons. Some of them were sweet, as are those of 
today, and some of them were quite bitter. The sweet 
ones and the bitter ones looked just alike. If one ate 
watermelon in those regions, it was the part of wisdom to 
go carefully. When one was opened, it was better to test 
it with the mere end of the tongue than to take a greedy 
mouthful at the very beginning. 

These watermelons were doubtless brought down the 
Nile into Egypt in very early times. Pictures in the 
pyramids made many thousands of years ago show water¬ 
melons on the tables. These Egyptians naturally brought 
the seeds of the sweet melons for planting and never grew 
the bitter ones. So, in the course of time, all the culti¬ 
vated melons came to be sweet. With cultivation also 
126 


WATERMELONS FROM AFRICA 

they increased in size. The fruit of the mother plants in 
Africa is not much like the huge fellows that disport 
themselves in the world’s markets today. 

This tropical vine that sprawls on the ground has found 
itself a home all around the world. Being tropical, it pre¬ 
fers the warmer states in America, for instance, to those 
farther north. It also likes light and sandy soils. That 
is the reason that fifty thousand carloads of them move 
from south to north in the United States every summer. 



127 


LXIV 


OAKS TRAINED TO PRODUCE CORK 

I SN'T IT ODD that man has found a way to trick the 
sturdy oak tree into making cork with which to stop 
his bottles! 

Cork does not come from the natural bark of the oak. 
Along the Mediterranean, chiefly in Spain and North 
Africa, there grows a hardy, evergreen oak. It is rarely 
more than thirty feet tall and two feet through the trunk. 
It does not compare with the splendid white oaks and red 
oaks of America. But it grows on poor ground that is 
good for nothing else. 

This oak tree, under natural conditions, does not pro¬ 
duce cork. It must be trained to do so. It takes fifty 
years to educate a cork-oak tree to the point where it 
yields a first-class crop of bottle stoppers. The Spanish 
learned how to do this many centuries ago. Science, with 
all its inventions, has not yet found a stopper to take its 
place. 

Here is the way the cork tree was taught to yield its 
crop. It is allowed to grow on a hillside for twenty-five 
years before its training starts. Then the cork farmer 
appears and strips off its outer bark, which seems little 
different from that of any other oak tree. He does not 
cut too deeply when he does this stripping, however, 
or he will kill the tree. The inner bark that carries the 
sap to nourish the tree is left in place. But the tree is 
peeled down to the part where it is tender. It immedi- 
128 


OAKS TRAINED TO PRODUCE CORK 

ately begins to put on a new outer skin to protect 
itself. 

Strangely, this new skin is not like the old. It is a 
thick, spongy layer. It is allowed to grow for eight or 
ten years; then it too is ripped off to just the right depth. 
This layer, however, is not yet cork. Ten more years pass 
and, at the age of forty-five, another layer of skin is taken 
off the cork tree. This layer is almost cork. It is good 
enough for fishermen to use on their nets to float them, 
but not good enough for bottle stoppers. 

Finally, when the oak tree is in its fifties, it is stripped 
for the fourth time. This time the bark is fit for its 
choicest uses. Each ten years for half a century after 
this, the cork layer is removed, and each time the tree 
puts on a new layer to protect itself. In the end, how¬ 
ever, it tires of its labor, becomes unprofitable, and the 
cork farmer cuts it down. 

Some decades ago, when California became a wine- 
producing State, she worried considerably about what 
would happen if the foreign supply of cork should be cut 
off. Cork oaks were brought to California and planted. 
They grew well on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada 
mountains. Thus the United States has laid the basis 
for growing its cork at home if it ever finds it necessary 
to do so. 


129 


LXV 


SPOON-FED CHRYSANTHEMUMS 

I SN’T IT ODD that it is possible to feed chrysanthe¬ 
mums with a spoon when they are being prepared for 
shows or for the market! 

Yet just this thing happens. I have seen it done in 
the hothouses of the government in Washington. 

The chrysanthemum, it seems, is a well-trained plant. 
It is used to being stall-fed. It has come a long way from 
the time when it used to be a sort of wild daisy on the 
plains of China. It was a very promising daisy; so speci¬ 
mens of it were sent to England, where florists began to 
experiment with its development. They selected seed 
from their biggest flowers and planted them. This pro¬ 
duced seeds from which still bigger flowers resulted. 
They took the biggest of these and planted them. So 
were bigger and bigger chrysanthemums grown. 

Among the yellow flowers, also, there were found occa¬ 
sional individuals that had pink petals or maroon ones. 
These plants were crossed with others like them. Then 
those with most pink and maroon were selected and again 
crossed. Finally chrysanthemums of these colors were 
established. 

So were different types of chrysanthemum developed 
from this Chinese daisy. They came to be popular au¬ 
tumn flowers. Growers began to take pride in them. 
Competitions developed. There came to be chrysanthe¬ 
mum shows. 


130 


SPOON-FED CHRYSANTHEMUMS 

The flowers are spoon-fed in preparation for these 
shows. The finest specimens are put into pots filled with 
the richest of soil. They are grown through the summer. 
As autumn comes on, only a single bud is allowed to de¬ 
velop on a plant. All the vigor of that plant goes into 
this one flower. 

The strongest of plant foods are selected. One of these, 
rich in nitrates, is called “ plant blood.” It is ladled into 
the pot with a spoon. The chrysanthemum is a gour¬ 
mand for rich food. It will take such quantities of it as 
would kill many plants. After it has been fed plant 
blood, it is given sheep manure for a change. Tiring of 
this, cow manure is substituted. There may be other 
fertilizers. The appetite of the plant is pampered to the 
extreme. Finally it is given lampblack, which adds a bril¬ 
liant sheen to the flower. At show time each entry has 
all that could be put into one single bloom. There they 
are, gorgeous flowers a foot across, little resembling the 
modest ancestors from which they came. 


131 


LXVI 


STUMPS THAT GROW 

I SN'T IT ODD that the ranger naturalists of the De¬ 
partment of the Interior, in Yellowstone Park, have 
found Douglas fir stumps that continue to grow after the 
trees are cut down! 

By this it is not meant that sprouts come from the 
stumps and grow new tops. The stumps themselves 
quite without leaves went on putting on new layers of 
bark and wood. One of them entirely covered its top in 
much the same way that a growing tree covers the wound 
when a limb is cut off. 

Four of these stumps that kept alive were found along 
the park trail that leads to Vernal Falls. It was found 
that it had been thirty-four years since the tree that one 
of them had supported had been cut down. One of these 
living stumps was split open that the manner of its 
growth might be examined. It was found that it had, 
since the tree was cut down, put on layers of wood that 
are three inches thick. 

This seemed a very peculiar situation to the park natu¬ 
ralists. Many kinds of trees are strongly inclined to 
throw out new sprouts from their stumps when they are 
cut down. The Douglas fir, however, does not sprout 
from the stump. This made it even more surprising that 
these particular stumps should go on growing. 

Plant growth is, of course, made possible by plant food 
procured from some source. The leaves of the tree manu- 
132 


STUMPS THAT GROW 

facture its food. A certain amount of temporary growth 
is possible from plant food that may be stored up in 
stem or roots. Continued growth, however, must be 
based on leaves that manufacture plant food. These 
stumps, the naturalists argued, must be tied in some way 
to green leaves for the production of their food. 

The passing of time presented an explanation of this 
queer situation. Fortunately the explanation was set up 
by the side of Vernal Falls trail, where all might see. The 
rain washed away the soil about one of these living 
stumps. There, beneath the ground, it was shown that 
a root from the strangely growing stump had grown to¬ 
gether with a root of a tree that still lived. The one had 
been grafted to the other. Thus it was made possible for 
the stump of the fallen tree to keep alive by drawing a 
food supply from the root of its companion tree that still 
got a food supply from its leaves. Had this stump been 
the sort that puts forth sprouts, there would never have 
been any occasion to search for its secret. Being a Doug¬ 
las fir stump, it could not send up sprouts and so by its 
strange evidences of life presented a mystery to be solved. 


133 


LXVII 


LAZY TREES 

I SN’T IT ODD that of two trees in an orchard, seem¬ 
ingly from the very same stock, one will bear twice 
as much fruit as the other! 

No less strange is the fact that the skilled orchardist 
has found a way to convert the light-bearing tree into an 
exact twin to the heavy-bearing tree. 

It is true, even, that certain limbs of a tree bear more 
heavily than other limbs. The orchardist, in this situa¬ 
tion, too, has found a way to take advantage of these par¬ 
ticularly productive limbs and build up whole groves of 
trees that have their qualities. 

The first step in accomplishing these ends is to find out 
which trees bear heavily and which lightly. Scientific 
citrus fruit growers have been numbering the trees of 
their orchards of late and then keeping a record of the 
fruit they yield year after year. Thus is it soon estab¬ 
lished that certain of them are working hard and faith¬ 
fully and certain of them are loafing on the job. Certain 
trees are profitable, and others do not pay their keep. 

In most citrus orchards the roots of the trees are of 
some vigorous stock, and there has been budded on this 
stock some other variety that has desirable fruit qualities. 
The best orchardists now use buds not only from trees 
that have fruit-bearing records but from the very 
branches that have borne abundant fruit. 

But the most interesting application of the selection, 
134 


LAZY TREES 


for budding purposes, of these heavily yielding trees lies 
in the transforming of the drone trees into good pro¬ 
ducers. By the keeping of the production record, the 
drone has been located. It is shown not to be filling the 
number of boxes it should fill. It is occupying orchard 
space for which it is not giving adequate returns. If it 
were let alone, it would probably continue to do so for 
fifty years. 

So the orchardist goes to one of the trees that is a 
proved producer. He gets choice buds from heavily 
yielding limbs. He brings those buds to the tree that is 
a loafer. He grafts them on its sturdy limbs three or four 
feet from the ground. There they attach themselves to 
the growing tree and put forth shoots. When these shoots 
are vigorous, the orchardist, comes along and saws off the 
old tops of the tree. All its vigor is then directed into the 
grafted shoots of the heavily yielding tree. They grow 
and prosper. In a few years they are yielding abun¬ 
dantly, as did the mother from which they were taken. 
The drone tree that did not pay its way has been con¬ 
verted into a heavy yielder. 


135 


LXVIII 


CHERRY TREES FOR SHADE 

I SN’T IT ODD that in many places in Europe the roads 
are shaded with towering sweet cherry trees which in 
season feed the multitude, while in America we seem 
never to have thought of planting trees that would serve 
the purpose of producing fruit and, at the same time, 
keeping the highway cool! 

Of the two kinds of cherries, those that are sweet and 
those that are sour, the former grow on much larger trees. 
The trees grow upright to a height of forty or sixty feet 
and form a thick top with many leaves. It is these that 
make good shade trees and that also produce the sort of 
fruit that is best for eating fresh. 

A hundred years ago in Europe there was much rivalry 
among the smaller nations that have since been bound to¬ 
gether as Germany. Each tried to do as much as it could 
to make its people happy. In those days and even yet in 
Europe the plain people travel from village to village on 
foot. There was reason, therefore, why the roadside 
should be made attractive. 

In Moravia, in the North, there was a roadway which 
for sixty miles was bordered on both sides by sweet cherry 
trees. From Strasbourg, in the South, to Munich, a jour¬ 
ney of about two hundred miles, much of the distance 
could be traveled between cherry trees. The practice of 
planting such trees extended over into Switzerland and 
is still kept up there. 


136 


CHERRY TREES FOR SHADE 

The public is welcome to help itself to these roadside 
cherries. The persons whose properties border these 
roads are supposed to have first call on them if they want 
the fruit of any particular trees. Under these circum¬ 
stances they tie a wisp of straw to a branch which over¬ 
hangs the road. This is a sign which the public respects. 
There are plenty of cherries; so if the land-owner wants 
those of a certain tree, he is welcome to them. 

These cherries have an interesting history in their rela¬ 
tion to the people of Europe. They did not grow on that 
continent until about the time of Caesar. The Roman 
general, Lucullus, returning in 70 b.c. from victorious 
campaigns in Asia Minor, brought seeds of a fruit he had 
eaten there. They were planted, and in due course cher¬ 
ries were grown in Italy. The fruit became popular. 
The Roman legions, in their campaigns, carried cherry 
seeds with them wherever they went. It was thus that 
they came to England in the first century after Christ. 
The cherry thrived throughout most of Europe and has 
been close to the hearts of the people ever since. 


137 


LXIX 


CHEESE FROM BEANS 

I SN’T IT ODD that Nature 
has developed a vegetable 
that man can use as a substi¬ 
tute for meat whenever cir¬ 
cumstances make it necessary! 

The humble bean of the 
fields is full of the very pro¬ 
teins that give beefsteak its 
value, and may, indeed, be used in its stead with little 
or no loss of body well-being. 

Cheese is also a nourishing and valuable food of animal 
origin and, though few Americans are aware of the fact, 
in the Orient millions of pounds of cheese are every year 
made of beans. The bean is the meat of the poor. In 
Mexico it is the staff of life of the peon, who is not able to 
buy meat. In Europe it is in much more general use than 
in America, and the people who eat it are well nourished. 
In Manchuria, China, Japan, and India vast quantities of 
beans are consumed and fill the place in the diet elsewhere 
occupied by meat. 

It is a less palatable food than meat and a bit harder to 
digest. If people can afford it, they prefer meat. In an 
emergency, however, they fall back on beans and get 
along quite well. 

The soy bean of China grows freely and abun¬ 
dantly and is extensively used as feed for stock in the 
138 



CHEESE FROM BEANS 

United States. It is a bit strong to the American 
taste. 

Perhaps this is because Americans have not learned to 
use it as do the Chinese. The latter do not boil it or bake 
it as Americans do. Instead, they cook it in such a way 
as to extract its nourishment in the form of a liquid. 
This liquid is actually a milk. After it is taken out of the 
beans, the solid matter that is left may be used for feeding 
stock. 

It is of this milk that cheese is made. In this way 
certain proof is given that it is in reality milk. These 
bean cheeses appear in China in many forms. There are 
as many varieties of them as there are of cheeses from the 
American cheese factory. They are of as many odors, 
and some of them can match the most pungent of Lim- 
burger. They are very high in nutritive value. 

If a time should ever come when the population of the 
world is so great that it could not be fed with the foods 
that it now eats, the natural development would be to 
displace livestock and use beans as a substitute for such 
animal products as beef and cheese. Under such an ad¬ 
justment there is little doubt but that the earth would 
support twice the number of people that it does with 
cows cropping its grasses or eating bean hay and thus 
producing proteins in a roundabout way. 

This leads to the conclusion that the modest bean may 
have a future of great importance. 


139 


LXX 


A STUBBORN CANADIAN ENEMY 

I SN’T IT ODD that, after thousands of years of en¬ 
mity, man and his ancient plant foe, the thistle, are 
now engaging in the most desperate of all their battles! 

In Biblical times seeds that fell among thistles were not 
regarded as having much of a chance, and ever since those 
times the thistle has been fought by those who engage in 
agriculture. And why should it not be fought? Does 
not the thistle crowd the wheat out of the field, the grass 
out of the meadow, defy live stock to eat it, and prove a 
prickly irritant to whoever comes near it? And does it 
not put wings on its seeds, and does not this thistledown 
ride away on the winds and scatter itself far and wide? 

Man has usually been able to get rid of thistles in his 
fields by cutting them down before they made seed. But 
now there appears a new and more desperate enemy, the 
Canada thistle, which refuses to be done away with in 
any such simple manner. 

In addition to its thistledown the Canada thistle grows 
a great network of roots in the ground, some of which it 
may send for a dozen feet one way and another. Then 
from the joints of these roots it sends up new shoots. So 
it multiplies itself underground, where it cannot be pun¬ 
ished. It lives from one year to another. If the land is 
plowed, the broken roots merely start growing again. 
How to get rid of the Canada thistle was, for a long time, 
a puzzle. 


140 


A STUBBORN CANADIAN ENEMY 

It took the government itself to find out how to kill 
these roots. Being wise in the ways of plants, Uncle Sam 
developed a method of starving them to death. This is 
the way it works. 

It is the leaves of plants that prepare their food for 
them. Green leaves up there in the air and sun combine 
elements that they take from the air with those they get 
from water taken up through the roots, and thus they 
manufacture plant food. If there are no leaves, no food 
can be prepared. 

So the government decided that these roots must not 
be allowed to send up leaves. When the food was gone 
that they had stored up in themselves, they would die. 

Fields that have Canada thistle should be planted with 
some such crop as corn. This should be cultivated very 
carefully, to see that no leaves have a chance to work at 
the food making. A year, perhaps two years, of this cul¬ 
tivation will be needed to get rid of the Canada thistle. 
Since the land is no good as long as the roots are living, 
it is worth while taking such great pains to kill them. 


141 


LXXI 


DAISY FLOWERS HAVE LEARNED TO 
COOPERATE 

I SN’T IT ODD that a modest group of plants 
has hit upon the idea of cooperative action, 
of many units working together, and that by so doing it 
has prospered until there are more of them than there 
are of any other flower-bearing member of the vegetable 
kingdom! 

It was the members of the daisy family that learned to 
act together. Other flowering plants send forth single 
blossoms, which offer drops of honey to bees as pay for 
bringing them pollen. Then the plants set single seeds 
or small clusters of them. 

The flowers of the daisy family club together. A hun¬ 
dred or so of them form in a group. They bind them¬ 
selves together in a cluster or head. Their business is 
to make seed to carry on the race, and they will work 
together to that end. 

Their first need is pollen. They know that the bees 
have, sticking to their bodies, from other flowers, this 
dust that will make them fertile. They want the bees 
to come to visit them. Perhaps a bit of advertising 
would help! 

So the daisy flower or the sunflower or the aster or 
any one of many other members of this group ask the 
florets on the outside to send out streamers that will at¬ 
tract the attention of the bees. These florets respond, and 
142 


DAISY FLOWERS COOPERATE 

the result is the well-known and widespread yellow 
petals. 

Presently a bee, its attention having been attracted by 
the petal advertisement, stops for lunch. It may run 
its beak into the cup of any one of the hundred florets 
that make up the group. In doing so, it is likely to crawl 
about more or less. As it goes, it shakes off pollen par¬ 
ticles. These find their way into the tiny cups of the 
florets and fertilize them. One bee, visiting the flower 
of any other plant, would fertilize a single cup. Coming 
to see a member of the daisy group, it may shake its 
pollen into a score of them. 

The arrangement of this cooperative lunch counter, 
with scores of cups from which to drink, appeals to many 
insects. The flowers of the daisy people are very popular. 
Thus it happens that they are always fertilized. They 
make many seeds. They have grown very strong in the 
plant world. They are gaining on other groups. The 
scientists believe that this is due to the union of many 
florets into one group and common action in seed-making. 


143 


LXXII 


THE KNOT HOLE’S STORY 

I SN’T IT ODD that a knot hole in a board tells the 
story of a limb of a tree and a buried wound in its 
body! 

This knot hole may appear in a board five or six inches 
from the part of it that was the outside of the tree. 
There may be clean-grained lumber for many inches and 
then there may appear, deep in the tree, a burly knot, 
strangely out of place. 

The wise lumberman knows well how it got there. It 
may have been fifty years ago that a straight, middle- 
sized tree was growing sturdily in its forest. A storm 
blew down a near-by monarch which, in falling, broke a 
limb off the middle-sized tree. The bare butt of a limb 
two feet long was left, and this soon died. 

The tree had to get rid of this dead limb butt. Egch 
spring, as is its way, it put on a covering of new growth 
much as it might put on a cloak. This new growth cov¬ 
ered every part of the tree from the tips of the twigs at 
its top to the tips of its roots in the ground. But here 
where the dead limb stuck through the bark was a place 
it could not cover. 

Year after year the new bark closed in about this dead 
limb. The rain from without and the sap from within 
kept its base wet, aiding decay. The strong new bark 
pinched like forceps. In the end they bit this limb butt 
off even with the outside of the tree. 


144 


THE KNOT HOLE’S STORY 

The next year the bark grew smoothly over the place 
where the limb had been. Other years followed, and 
layer after layer of wood growth took its place over the 
old wound. No one examining the tree could have told 
that any unusual thing had happened beneath this spot. 

But in the course of time the tree was cut down by the 
lumberman. Far toward the center of its trunk was found 
a strange, cross-grained spot that marred the lumber 
that was cut from it. The saw snarled angrily as it struck 
this spot. It showed darkly on the surface of a board. It 
might even fall out and leave a hole. It was what was 
left of the broken limb that the tree pinched off and 
healed over half a century before. 



145 





LXXIII 


TREES THAT ARE DWARFS 

I SN’T IT ODD that man has found a way to grow 
choice apples of any variety on dwarf plants that fit 
into the small space of city yards! 

Seeing these sturdy little trees bearing their loads of 
fruit, one is likely to wonder what magic has been worked 
on them, that they produce in this way. 

Back of it is much of the lore that plant-breeders have 
developed through the passing centuries. In the first 
place, there is the study of the many varieties of apple 
trees that grow in the world. Some are bigger than 
others, just as draft horses are bigger than Shetland 
ponies. 

A plant-breeder may select the variety of apple tree 
which is the smallest of them all. He may sow seeds from 
that tree. Occasionally a plant will result that is a dwarf 
even among dwarfs. Seeds from this tree may be planted, 
and a new variety developed that is, like the parent tree, 
unusually small. Then seeds from the most dwarfish of 
this generation may be planted, and still smaller trees 
may be developed. 

In the end, a variety of apple trees may be established 
that grows no more than four feet high. Its fruit may 
be quite poor, but the plant-breeder does not mind 
this. What he wanted was not fruit, but a small-sized 
plant. 

This apple-grower wants to grow his favorite Baldwins 
146 


TREES THAT ARE DWARFS 

or Northern Spies in the dwarf form. He is now ready to 
do just this. 

He resorts to grafting. He cuts a bud from the Baldwin 
apple tree and grafts it on to the stem of the dwarf apple. 
It grows there, drawing its nourishment from the dwarf. 
As is the usual method in this juggling of plants, the top 
of the dwarf is cut off, and only that of the Baldwin is 
left. Here, then, is a tree with dwarf roots and a Baldwin 
top. The roots provide only sufficient nourishment to 
support a dwarf plant. In growing, the tree holds to its 
dwarf quality and remains very small. 

But the nature of the fruit that develops is controlled 
by the top. The fruit comes to maturity pure Baldwin 
just as it does on the mother tree. If the top is Alber- 
marle Pippin, the fruit will be true to that variety. If 
it is Golden Royal, the fruit will be Golden Royal. So 
the breeder may grow whatever variety of apple he may 
desire on this dwarf stock and find space for it in yards 
that are narrow and not very deep. 


147 


LXXIV 


NO SUGAR FOR SHAKESPEARE 

I SN’T IT ODD that the Greeks and Romans, Charle¬ 
magne in his glory, the Knights of King Arthur’s 
Court, even Shakespeare and the intellectuals of his time, 
were entirely unacquainted with sugar, or, perhaps, 
tasted it only now and then! 

Sugar has become such a common article to modern 
people that it is hard to conceive of a time when civilized 
man did not have it on his table. Yet it has not been a 
part of the human diet very long. In Greek and Biblical 
times honey was the one thing mentioned in talking of 
sweetness. 

Sugar originated in India. There sugar cane was called 
the honey-bearing reed and spoken of as the plant that 
had escaped from Paradise. It thrived about the Indian 
Ocean and worked its way westward, finding a home along 
the River Jordan and in Arabia. 

The soldiers of Alexander the Great were the first Eu¬ 
ropeans to taste sugar. It came to be made at the eastern 
end of the Mediterranean and was encountered by the 
Crusaders when they went on their pilgrimages. 

The Moors brought sugar-cane to Spain, and Columbus 
planted it in the West Indies. Here it found a natural 
home. The world was just awakening to its delights. 
The anxiety of European nations for West Indian posses¬ 
sions was largely due to their desire for a source of sugar. 
At that time no method of making sugar from plants 
148 


NO SUGAR FOR SHAKESPEARE 

grown in temperate zones was known. Napoleon was 
chiefly responsible for finding a method of producing 
sugar from beets. During his wars he found his supplies 
of sugar from abroad cut off. He ordered his men of sci¬ 
ence to find some way to produce it at home. The pos¬ 
sibility of getting sugar from beets had already been 
demonstrated, but the development of the idea into an 
industry awaited Napoleon. 

As time passed, the method of producing sugar im¬ 
proved. It has become one of the cheapest of foods. In 
the United States everybody eats his weight in sugar 
every year. The United States consumes five million 
tons of it every twelve months. It would take a freight 
train 1250 miles long to haul this huge amount of sugar. 
The twenty million tons of it that the world consumes 
each year is so large an amount that we cannot im¬ 
agine it. 

Sugar is another gift of the plant world to man, for all 
sugar comes from the sap of plants and, indeed, the sap 
of all plants contains sugar. Sugar cane, the beet, and 
the maple tree give up sugar more readily than others; 
so it is their product that we know best. 


149 


LXXV 



ROBBING PERSIMMONS OF PUCKER 

I SN’T IT ODD that men 
of science have found a 
way to clip the string that 
puckers the mouth when 
we eat persimmons that are 
not entirely ripe! 

If a persimmon hangs on 
the tree until the frost 
touches it, the bitterness goes and it is good to eat. But 
it is also so soft that it will not stand handling and is 
available only to those who live near the place of its 
growth. If the bitterness could be made to disappear 
while the fruit was yet firm, the scientists thought, per¬ 
simmons could be shipped to market as are apples. 

The Japanese had a process for taking the pucker out 
of persimmons while they were still firm. They did it by 
putting them in casks that had contained sake, which is 
the national drink. The American scientists got some 
sake casks, sealed persimmons in them for a while, and 
found that the pucker had disappeared. They tried the 
experiment with whiskey kegs. It worked. They tried 
it in wine casks, which were less alcoholic, and it still 
worked. All this time they had thought that the loss of 
bitterness was due to some chemical reaction brought 
about by the presence of alcoholic fumes. 

Finally persimmons were put in butter tubs saturated 
150 


ROBBING PERSIMMONS OF PUCKER 

with alcohol. They lost their bitterness. Then a handier 
way to administer the stimulant was discovered. A piece 
of blotting paper saturated with alcohol was put in each 
tub. Still the process worked. 

By this time persimmons were being treated in large 
quantities. Hundreds of casks of them were being proc¬ 
essed and marketed. They were being brought to more 
and more tables in a form that was firm and delicious. 

Then an accident happened. A keg was opened, and it 
was found that whoever had packed it had neglected to 
put in the blotter with the alcohol. The persimmons, 
however, were firm and sweet. Sealed in kegs with no 
alcohol at all, they had nevertheless undergone the de¬ 
sired change. 

Still the men of science did not know what caused the 
transformation. As is the way of scientists, they in¬ 
sisted on finding out. They sealed persimmons in one 
of these casks, let it stand for a while, and examined the 
air that it contained. They found that the oxygen in 
the air had been used up, and that carbon-dioxide gas 
had taken its place. 

The experimenters proceeded on the theory that the 
carbon-dioxide gas combined with the tannic acid of the 
persimmons and changed its nature. They treated other 
persimmons, putting this gas in the casks instead of air. 
They sweetened much more quickly. So a process was 
perfected whereby persimmons are sealed up in the pres¬ 
ence of carbon-dioxide gas and robbed of their pucker. 


151 


LXXVI 


PLANTS THAT PREY 

I SN’T IT ODD that some plants live on other plants 
as well as on animals and human beings! 

These plants that prey are members of the fungus fam¬ 
ily. That family started out with the idea of never earn¬ 
ing its own living, but simply taking its food wherever it 
might. As a matter of fact, its original intention was to 
live on the waste vegetable matter that lay about. The 
toadstool in the corner of the barnyard typifies this 
method. The mold over the top of the jar of jam is an¬ 
other familiar example of its method. Both the toadstool 
and the mold are fungi. 

But as they went along, certain members of this fungus 
family were tempted to attack vegetation before it be¬ 
came waste. The face of a green leaf, for example, has 
much moisture in it, brought up from the roots, and fungi 
like moisture. The leaf is full of plant food, since it is 
the factory in which the plant manufactures its groceries. 

Certain of these tiny fungus plants got the habit of at¬ 
taching themselves to the leaves of living plants. The 
rusty spots so often seen on leaves are one of the results. 
Wilting leaves and “ burned ” leaves have suffered these 
attacks from fungi. Apple rust, that often spoils the crop, 
comes from great forests of tiny plants on the trees af¬ 
fected. Black rust, that destroys the wheat crops of the 
West, comes from a plant which lives on another. 

When these tiny plants attempted to find homes on 
152 


PLANTS THAT PREY 

living animals, they found the task more difficult. In the 
first place, they like acid homes, and animals are mostly 
alkali. The insides of animals are not very well venti¬ 
lated and these plants like air. 

The lower the form of animal life the more likely it is 
to be attacked by these tiny plants. Many insects have 
enemies that are very deadly. Man has found this out, 
and often, when an insect becomes a pest, he brings in its 
plant parasite and establishes it. This tiny plant some¬ 
times wipes out the pest. Man himself is fed upon by 
only a few of these plants, but some of them are quite 
deadly. A good many people die every year of bacterial 
and fungus diseases — of plants feeding on their vitals. 


153 


LXXVII 


PALMS BUILD CHIMNEYS 

I SN’T IT ODD that the bodies of palm trees are no 
bigger around when they are old than when they are 
young! 

The older a pine tree or an oak tree gets, the bigger it is 
around the trunk. The palm tree, on the contrary, builds 
itself as big at the base as it will ever be and never there¬ 
after, though it may live two hundred years, adds to its 
circumference. 

This comes about because the palm tree is of a differ¬ 
ent breed from other trees and has a different scheme of 
growth. Most of the trees of the forest or orchard grow 
on the outside. The sap carries building materials up 
from the roots through channels just beneath the bark. 
These trees are outside growers, adding each year a new 
layer to their girth. The palm tree, on the contrary, is an 
inside grower. Its sap goes up through the middle of it. 
It grows only at the top, by adding one layer after an¬ 
other to its height. 

Its crown at any time is a big “cabbage” of unde¬ 
veloped leaves. That crown, however, is as big across 
as the body of the tree. When the leaves finally un¬ 
furl themselves, they may be twenty feet long. They 
open back in such a way that they have added a bit 
to the height of the tree trunk. They tie into an out¬ 
side shell that is firm and unchanging. Its diameter 
will thereafter always remain the same. The sap will 
154 


PALMS BUILD CHIMNEYS 


come up through it, and the tree will grow only at the 
top. 

The palm, in growing this way, is unique among trees. 
It borrowed the idea, it would seem, from members of 
the grass family. The grasses are inside growers. The 
stalk of the tall bamboo, which is a grass, never increases 
its diameter. The members of the lily family also are 
inside growers. They add to their tops but not to the 
outside of their stalks. The yucca is a giant lily that 
comes near being a tree. It grows only at the top. 

The grasses, the lilies, and the palms, therefore, seem 
to be more nearly related to one another than they are to 
such other plants as hickory trees and rose bushes. All 
have sheath leaves that are attached to their trunks. A 
stalk of corn, which is a coarse grass, has leaves that are 
attached to it in a sheath, much as those of the palm are 
attached to its trunk. Even the leaves of the grasses, 
lilies, and palms are similar in a general way. They are 
blade-like. These inside growers are evidently kinsfolk. 



155 





LXXVIII 


APPLES HAVE TRAVELED FAR 

I SN’T IT ODD that in the Caucasus Mountains, where 
Turkey touches Russia, between the Black and Cas¬ 
pian seas, in the west of Asia, there are whole mountain 
sides that are white, in the spring, with the blossoms of 
apple trees that grow wild! 

When scientists take the back track, they find that this 
is the native home of our well-known apple, which con¬ 
tributes twice as much food to the people of the United 
States as any other fruit. 

There are wild apples growing all around the world in 
temperate zones, close relatives of the crab apple and not 
very good to eat. But here in the Caucasus there grows 
a wild apple that is sweet. It is the grandfather of all 
those apples that come to market in boxes, in New York, 
San Francisco, and Kalamazoo. 

The journey of those apples to market began some 
ten thousand years ago. At that time there lived in the 
Caucasus region certain tribes of white people that were 
destined to spread west and plant nations that would rule 
the world. They were the Aryans, sometimes called Cau¬ 
casians from these same mountains. They found this 
sweet apple in the woods and planted its seeds about their 
homes. In doing so, they established some of the first 
orchards that our ancestors ever knew. 

Later the Aryans moved west. When they did so, they 
took seeds from the best of their sweet apple trees, and 
156 


APPLES HAVE TRAVELED FAR 

when they stopped again, they planted them. They 
might wait a hundred or a thousand years and move on 
again. Again they would select the best of the apple seed 
to take with them. Finally they reached the Atlantic, 
spread out, and overran Europe. Apple trees likewise, 
grandchildren of the flowering forests of the Caucasus, 
found homes throughout the colder countries of that 
continent. 

Finally Europeans crossed the Atlantic and planted 
colonies. Wherever they went, this apple that had been 
companion of the race in its wanderings soon found a 
place and began to contribute to the comfort of its spon¬ 
sors. It has a home in all vigorous climates to which 
Aryans have gone. They have pushed it to the west 
until now it is becoming popular in Japan where, a little 
while ago, it was unknown. It has not as yet much hold 
in China. In another generation, however, it is probable 
that it will have pushed on to the west until it has come 
back to the Caucasus, much improved by its trip around 
the world. 


157 


LXXIX 


THE MAPLE FAMILY 

I SN'T IT ODD that there is a maple tree of so little 
force of character that it cannot stand alone but 
sprawls out on the ground like a vine! 

This strange maple grows in the woods of Oregon, 
Washington, and British Columbia. It starts out like 
any other tree of its kind, but from lack of backbone it 
soon topples over and spreads itself out on the floor of 
the forest. It goes on producing leaves and the two¬ 
winged fruit, or keys, that mark it as a maple, but its 
lowly station is quite different from that of some of the 
proud trees of the family. 

Various members of the maple family have traits of 
character that are not at all like those of other members. 
They differ, as do the members of the human family. 
There is the red maple, for instance, which gives way to 
showy vanity. The red maple likes vivid colors. In win¬ 
ter its twigs and buds are red. The flowers which appear 
early in the spring are red. When the leaves are young 
they, too, are red. The keys which bear the seeds are red. 
The autumn leaves indulge in a blaze of gorgeous color 
before they drop to the ground. 

The silver maple shows little vivid coloring. Its leaves 
are green on top and silver beneath. They are very beau¬ 
tiful leaves. The silver maple will take root wherever it 
is planted and grow quickly into a large tree. It is 
friendly and pleasant to look upon. But by nature it 
158 


THE MAPLE FAMILY 

leans a bit toward its Oregon cousin. Having used its 
graces to induce people to plant it along city streets, it 
fails to make good. It weakens and blows down. The 
vain red maple, though hard to get started in streets and 
parks, has a sturdy constitution and makes good in the 
long run. 

The box elder belongs to the maple family, though its 
leaf is shaped like that of the ash tree. It is another of 
those accommodating plants that will grow almost any¬ 
where. It was much planted by settlers in the prairie 
country. But it, too, has soft wood for a body and does 
not last. 

The Norway maple, borrowed from the Old World, an¬ 
other hardwood relative, makes a beautiful and sturdy 
tree for street planting and is coming to be among the 
most popular of all shade trees. 

The sugar maple is the stern and reliable member of 
the family. It also ranks among the handsomest of 
American shade trees. It has a sturdy hardwood body 
that no storm can break down and that will survive 
through the centuries. In addition to this it yields sap 
for maple sugar. It can be bled of twenty-five gallons of 
sap for sugar-making, one spring after another, and never 
seems to feel the loss. It is a long stretch from the weak- 
spined maple of the western woods to this stern and com¬ 
petent sister of the eastern hillsides. 


159 


LXXX 


MAN SPREADS WEEDS 

I SN'T IT ODD that man, as he pushes his commerce 
around the world, so multiplies his enemies that it 
seems sometimes as though they would destroy him! 

This danger has long been apparent in the case of in¬ 
sects. It is the ships of man that have borne one species 
of domestic cockroach, once known only in India, all 
around the world. The gipsy moth was brought to New 
England by man. The Japanese beetle came in on the 
roots of plants man brought from the Orient. The corn 
borer came over from Europe only a few years ago. 

But man does not stop with insects in multiplying his 
enemies. He does likewise with plants. He brings, from 
the ends of the earth, those weeds that he has fought 
through the centuries and starts them in his own fields. 

The weeds of the world largely have come to America 
in a strange manner. Many ships from many lands have 
come to these shores with cargoes and for cargoes. It has 
often happened that the cargoes they brought were 
packed with hay or straw. This waste has been thrown 
out wherever unpacking has taken place. Often it has 
carried the seeds of weeds that were enemies to man. 

Sometimes ships which have come to this country to 
take cargoes have contained ballast — earth or other 
waste. This ballast has been dumped on American 
shores. It has often carried weed seeds that have taken 
hold and done vast amounts of harm. 

160 


MAN SPREADS WEEDS 

Then, in his commerce, man has brought seeds of de¬ 
sirable crops from many lands. He has sowed wheat, 
clover, and grass that have come from abroad. It is very 
hard to get seed that is pure and clean. Harmful weeds 
are likely to come in with such seed. Thus man broad¬ 
casts his enemies. 

The common daisy of the fields is an example of a 
harmful plant that has overrun America. It was not 
known here until Europeans came. In Europe, where the 
land is carefully cultivated, it does little harm. But in 
America, where there is much idle land, it has spread far 
and wide. There are probably more daisies in America 
today than in all the rest of the world combined. It 
crowds out useful crops and is itself useless. 



161 



LXXXI 


CACTUS FOR COWS 

I SN’T IT ODD that man has found a way to make use 
of even so forbidding a child of Nature as the prickly 
pear of the West! 

That great stretch of desert country that reaches from 
San Antonio to Los Angeles favors the prickly pear above 
all plants. With its skin sealed airtight on the outside, it 
can hold its moisture, as few others can, and remain green 
and vigorous with little water. With its needle-sharp 
thorns it scorns attack from browsing cattle or even the 
nibbling jack rabbit. It survives where most forms of life 
perish. 

Cattlemen through the decades have seen their herds 
die of starvation, while beneath the thorn covering of the 
prickly pear was much nourishing food. It remained for 
men of science, sent into these parts by the Department 
of Agriculture, to work out a plan for utilizing the stock 
feed that lay well fortified in this plant. 

First they tried growing it under cultivation. This 
plant, which got along quite well where few others would 
live, grew to surprising size when the ground was plowed 
and water was allowed to enter the soil when the few 
rains of the year came. Cultivated prickly pears grew 
ten times as fast as those that were not cultivated. 

The crop was planted somewhat as sugar cane is — by 
laying the joints in a furrow. These joints took root and 
grew. They went right on growing summer and winter. 
162 


CACTUS FOR COWS 

They yielded from twenty to fifty tons of cattle feed to 
the acre. 

There remained only the problem of how it was to be 
used. Then someone thought of a novel scheme — that 
of using a blowpipe and burning the thorns off. This 
scheme was tried; it worked well. After the flame of the 
blowpipe was passed over the thorns of a plant, those 
thorns had disappeared. The cattle soon discovered the 
miracle and fell on the singed plants and devoured them. 

So was a way found for growing a new forage crop or 
at least for making use, in an emergency, of Nature’s crop 
in the Southwest. The prickly pear grows year after 
year. If it is needed, it can be singed and fed to cattle. 
If it is not needed, it remains green and keeps growing. 
If it is not used for ten years, none of its growth will be 
wasted. It is stored fodder, but it needs no barn. 

Finally the time of need comes. The ranchman goes 
out with his torch and burns the thorns off one row of 
prickly pears. That is the ration for his stock for the day. 
They may eat only that row; the reserve food supply they 
cannot touch. On the next day more thorns are singed. 
It is easier to give the stock, in this way, what food they 
are to have than it would be if they were being fed hay 
which must be pitched down from the stack and hauled 
out to them. The prickly pear, in fact, has certain ad¬ 
vantages over even red clover, as a food for cattle. 


163 


LXXXII 


NATURE’S IDEA OF COTTON 

I SN’T IT ODD that one of those tricks that plants play 
to get their seeds distributed has resulted in the pro¬ 
vision of clothes for half of mankind! 

A certain scrubby tree of the mallow family, cousin to 
the marsh mallow, growing in the tropics hundreds of 
thousands of years ago, found that it was not getting on 
as well as it might. 

It had a seed pod that opened like a hickory nut and 
let its seeds sift out. They fell on the ground and stayed 
there. They would have had a much better chance, how¬ 
ever, if they could have got scattered around. The prob¬ 
lem was to devise a scheme for getting them distributed 
far and near when they were ripe. 

This tree of the mallow family hit upon the idea of 
growing hairs on its seeds to give them wings. These 
fluffy hairs would furnish something of which the wind 
could get hold, to carry the seeds away. If enough of 
these hairs were grown about the seeds, they would pro¬ 
vide a light-weight ball that might float far on water. 
If this ball fell on the ground, some clumsy-footed ani¬ 
mal might strike it and knock it along. Anyway, this 
tree of the mallow family would grow plenty of these 
tiny hairs on its seeds and see what would happen. 

After this habit was well formed, man came along. In 
India and in Peru, on different sides of the world, man in 
the long ago found that he could take the fiber from 
164 


NATURE’S IDEA OF COTTON 

around these seeds and twist it into threads to weave into 
cloth. He had already learned to make cloth of wool. 
Because he was familiar with this product from the 
sheep’s back, he called the new fiber “ tree wool.” 

Cotton, as it is cultivated today, does not grow on 
trees, but in the tropics it still flourishes in the native 
state. Even today, high up in the Andes, one may come 
upon a tree in the autumn forest that looks as though it 
were a mass of snow. It is a cotton tree, and its seeds are 
just maturing. These trees do not die down in the fall 
of the year, as does the cotton of the cultivated field, but 
live on through the decades, as a plum tree might. 

When the seeds of the cotton tree were brought to the 
North and planted, the young sprouts grew rapidly, blos¬ 
somed, and made seed in a single summer. When the 
frost came, it blighted and killed this child of the tropics. 
So it came to pass that cotton was planted in the spring 
and harvested in the autumn. Few people realize that as 
an annual this plant is living a most unnatural life. 

Cotton was really not an important material for use in 
clothing mankind until the cotton gin was invented 150 
years ago to separate the fiber from the seed. This made 
cotton available in bulk. The spinning industry grew 
rapidly. The southern states of this country produced 
cotton to meet the demand and thereby enriched them¬ 
selves. How different would have been their history if 
the old-time cotton tree had not hit upon this peculiar 
plan for getting its seeds scattered about. 


165 


LXXXIII 


TINY PLANTS MANUFACTURE FERTILIZER 

I SN'T IT ODD that the tiny plants that can be seen 
only with a microscope, clinging to a clover root, and 
the greatest hydro-electric plant in the world, that at 
Muscle Shoals, are working on exactly the same job, that 
of taking nitrogen out of the air that it may be used as 
fertilizer! 

These plants, or bacteria, grow on the roots of those 
other plants that produce their seeds in pods like beans 
and are known as legumes. 

Nitrogen is one of the most abundant materials in the 
world, yet one of the hardest to use. More than four- 
fifths of the air is nitrogen; so it is everywhere. It is one 
of the most important of plant foods, but it can be used 
only when properly mixed with other materials. And 
nitrogen is very exclusive. It refuses to mix unless cer¬ 
tain conditions are present. 

The fact that the bacteria on the roots of legumes can 
change nitrogen develops many unusual situations. It 
leads to the planting of these legumes on worn-out land 
and, after they have produced their nitrogen compounds, 
to plowing under the crop for the enrichment of the soil. 

Failure to understand these bacteria furnished a 
strange story in the agricultural history of the nation. 
This was in the case of alfalfa, a legume and probably 
the oldest and most productive of all forage crops, which 
was brought by the Greeks from Persia five hundred 
166 


TINY PLANTS MANUFACTURE FERTILIZER 

years before Christ. Alfalfa was early introduced into 
the eastern part of the United States, where it languished 
and died. A hundred years later it was found that it had 
languished because it had had no bacteria to get nitrogen 
from the air for it. It was given those bacteria and now 
grows abundantly throughout the East. 

Alfalfa arrived in the East by the roundabout way of 
Mexico and California and by working its way more 
slowly than covered wagons traveled in going the other 
direction. Its slow progress, it afterward developed, was 
due to the fact that it took time for its helpful bacteria to 
develop in the soils of new regions. 

It was after alfalfa had succeeded in Kansas and failed 
in Illinois that a scientist in the latter state discovered 
the fact of its need for bacteria. He sent to Kansas for a 
ton of soil from an alfalfa field and spread it over an acre 
in Illinois. Alfalfa grew abundantly on that acre. From 
it bacteria were spread over many states and got the 
alfalfa crop started. 


167 


LXXXIV 


WHERE DID CORN COME FROM? 

I SN’T IT ODD that the scientists, with all their 
knowledge of plant families and origins, have not 
been able to find out whence came corn, the greatest of 
crops! 

There is no wild corn in all the world. There is no 
kindred grass with corn-like traits which would seem a 
possible ancestor from which it might have developed. 

Corn when left to itself, even under the most favorable 
conditions, will not survive. Its seeds have no way of 
distributing themselves. They have no wings like the 
thistledown, on which they can fly away. They stick to 
the tail of no animal, as does the cockleburr, that they 
may be carried far from the parent bush. They hold on 
to their cob which, even if it got itself buried, would send 
up a clump of plants which would strangle one another. 
Unaided corn cannot thrive; it seems to have no place 
in nature. It can live only with man’s help. 

Corn was not known to the Eastern Hemisphere before 
the time of Columbus. It was found under cultivation 
when the white man first came to America. The Indians 
raised it in their fields. The Aztecs and the Incas, farther 
south, cultivated it extensively. But they knew no kin¬ 
dred plant from which it might have come. They did 
not know where they got it. Perhaps the Aztecs inherited 
corn from a people who had preceded them, and perhaps 
these in turn had inherited it from yet another race. So 
168 


WHERE DID CORN COME FROM? 

long had it existed under the care of man that its ances¬ 
tors had quite disappeared. 

Yet corn, the scientists say, gives evidence of youth¬ 
fulness as a species. Old species are set in their ways; 
they are hard to change. New species yield readily to the 
graces of cultivation. Corn shows the evidences of youth 
in this respect. Bred in one direction it becomes sweet 
corn; in another, popcorn. Its grains can be bred white 
or yellow or red or blue. Through selection of seed its 
yield can be increased. It is pliant and responsive. It is 
young. 

Yet outside the cultivated field it cannot survive. It 
would seem a thing called into being by man and kept 
alive by him. But when and how it attached itself to 
him and how it got along before his coming is not known; 
that is one of the mysteries on the back track of civili¬ 
zation. 



169 


LXXXV 


INVENTING NEW FRUITS 

I SN'T IT ODD that the trifoliate, or Japanese, orange, 
a hedge plant which grows freely amid the snows of 
central United States, can mate with the orange tree of 
the tropics and produce a new fruit! 

This trifoliate orange is unlike the ordinary orange: it 
grows three leaves on a stem while the latter grows one; 
it is deciduous while the other is evergreen. It is, never¬ 
theless, a member of the citrus group, and these members 
are able to cross with each other. 

Plant-breeders of the Department of Agriculture three 
decades ago began experiments intended to develop citrus 
varieties which would stand cold and could therefore be 
grown in the United States outside of Florida and Cali¬ 
fornia. They hit upon this northern representative of 
the citrus group and crossed it with the orange. They 
had to wait years for the resulting trees to come into 
fruitage. Finally they did so, and the process of elimina¬ 
tion was begun to determine which of the new plants 
produced a fruit of value. 

Most of them were useless. The trifoliate fruit was of 
poor quality. There were a few exceptions in which there 
were possibilities. The fruit produced on these few 
plants, called a citrange from its two parents, was more 
like a lemon than like its orange ancestor on the fruit- 
yielding side. The tree was hardy and would grow 
throughout the Gulf States. It came to be planted in 
170 


INVENTING NEW FRUITS 

many home gardens, and its fruit was widely used for 
making “ ades.” The chief objection to it was the fact 
that the skin was so intensely bitter — an inheritance 
from the trifoliate orange — that a single drop of juice 
from it would spoil a pitcher of the drink the fruit 
furnished. 

So these fruit-breeders decided on another cross. They 
mated this citrange with the kumquat, a mild-skinned 
citrus fruit used only for candying and preserving. An 
improved fruit resulted that would grow in the southern 
half of such states as Georgia and Alabama. It has been 
christened the citrangequat, from the three stocks from 
which it came. It is today growing in hundreds of door- 
yards through the South. This plant is a very attractive 
ornamental tree for lawns. Its brilliant evergreen leaves 
and its abundance of bright orange-red fruit are most 
attractive. From the time this fruit is half grown in July 
it may be used for the purposes usually served by lemons. 
In addition, because of its mild skin, it can be used for 
candying purposes and as preserves. Then in November, 
when it is fully ripe, it may be eaten like an orange. 

Thus is a most attractive new citrus fruit created, one 
that will grow without fear of frosts over a great area of 
the United States. The probabilities are that it will be 
still further improved as time passes and will take its 
place as a permanent addition to the diet of the nation. 


171 


LXXXVI 


A NEGLECTED PLANT 

I SN’T IT ODD that the people 
of the temperate zones refuse 
to eat aroids, those root crops of 
the tropics that have probably 
nourished more people since time 
began than has even that prime 
grain crop, wheat! 

The aroids are plants that 
grow in wet places. The best- 
known aroid in the United States 
is the elephant’s ear, used as an ornamental plant in gar¬ 
dens. But there are government farms in the South 
where twenty tons of good food are grown on the roots 
of these aroids on a single acre. 

These food plants are extensively used in the West 
Indies, in Central America, in Hawaii, where they fur¬ 
nish poi, the national dish throughout Polynesia, China, 
India, and equatorial Africa. They furnish abundant and 
nourishing food to tropical peoples almost without effort 
on the part of the latter. But in the North people refuse 
to eat them. It is not because they are found to be un¬ 
palatable. The Department of Agriculture has raised 
abundant crops of dasheens, which belong to this group, 
brought them to Washington, and distributed them ex¬ 
perimentally. People have taken them home, cooked 
them, and said that they liked them. The general verdict 
172 



A NEGLECTED PLANT 

has been that a baked dasheen has more flavor and is 
more palatable than a baked potato. It has a sort of 
nutty flavor that is pleasing. Most people who have 
eaten them say that they consider them better than 
potatoes. 

But the dasheen does not come into use. There is prob¬ 
ably no reason for this other than the difficulty in dis¬ 
placing something that is established with something 
new. The people who live in temperate countries have 
their food habits. One of these is the eating of potatoes. 
These take care of the need of a food of this class. They 
are always in the markets. They are satisfactory. There 
seems to be no reason for changing to this strange food 
which one would probably have much trouble in getting. 

It was with great difficulty that potatoes, 250 years ago, 
found a place in the diet of Europeans. To-day corn on 
the cob and grapefruit are almost unknown in Europe. 
Hollanders grow mutton for the British but will not eat 
it themselves. To Jews and Mohammedans the pig is 
unclean. Millions of people south of the Mediterranean 
regard dried grasshoppers as a delicacy, but this food is 
scorned farther north. Meat shops in Italy take pride in 
advertising horseflesh for sale, but the idea would not 
appeal to Americans. 

The food of the tropics takes hold slowly farther north. 
It is always there as a reserve supply, however, and if a 
time arrives when a dense world population needs to 
utilize these spaces for its maintenance, they will be' 
available. 


173 


LXXXVII 


SUNFLOWER TRAVELS 

I SN’T IT ODD that one may find, in the fields, wild 
sunflowers with little faces barely an inch across and 
then in city back yards come upon their counterparts that 
are nearly a foot from rim to rim! 

The origin of these huge sunflowers was for a long time 
a mystery. For hundreds of years they have been widely 
grown in Europe, where their seeds are highly prized for 
poultry and livestock. From Europe they came to 
America and have been grown through most of the coun¬ 
try as ornamentals. 

What puzzled the botanists was the fact that the sun¬ 
flower is known to be an American plant that did not 
exist in Europe before the settlement of this country. 
Despite this, it seemed that the cultivated sunflower 
came from the old country. 

Then, finally, some earnest student, searching early 
colonial records, got a clue from the accounts of Cham¬ 
plain and Segur, early explorers in the Great Lakes coun¬ 
try. It was three hundred years ago that these men vis¬ 
ited Indian tribes in the region, now a part of Canada, 
to the east of Lake Huron. There they found the natives 
cultivating these huge sunflowers, using their stems for 
fiber, their blooms in making a yellow dye, and their 
seeds as food and in the manufacture of hair oil. Since 
the sunflower was not a native of that region, it was 
thought that these Indians must have brought it from 
174 


SUNFLOWER TRAVELS 

the western prairies at an earlier date and developed it 
through the passing generations. 

The method by which a plant of value can be bred up 
from one of no apparent worth is well known. The huge 
modern tomato has been developed in the last hundred 
years from the “ love apple.” The exquisite roses of the 
garden came from wild roses with flowers much like those 
on the apple tree. 

The improvement comes about from the selection of 
the seeds from the best specimen of one generation to be 
the parent of the next. By selecting the largest sun¬ 
flowers in their patches for seed, these Indians, probably 
holding to the idea for generations, had developed the 
cultivated sunflower from the wild. This, by the way, 
shows that the American Indian, even then, had some 
rather advanced ideas of scientific agriculture. 

Early Canadians had doubtless sent this cultivated 
sunflower back to Europe where it had become popular, 
later to return to its native America and furnish a mys¬ 
tery to be unraveled. 


175 


LXXXVIII 


COAXING THE SUGAR BEET 

I SN’T IT ODD that man can start out with a tiny, wild 
plant that stores food in its bit of a root as big as your 
thumb and develop that root into a lusty vegetable that 
weighs twenty pounds and forms the basis of a great 
industry! 

Yet this is what he has done in the case of the beet. 
One is not likely to see a wild beet as he does wild car¬ 
rots, but he may appreciate the extent to which the beet 
has been cultivated if he compares the ordinary beet of 
the garden with those monster roots — often as big as a 
child’s body — which may be seen at the beet sugar 
factory. 

The beet started out as a small plant that stored up a 
bit of food in its root during the first year of its growth for 
use the second year in making seed. Man tried eating 
this wild root and rather liked it. He planted it in his 
garden and, by selecting seed from the big beets and 
planting it, gradually increased its size. He finally had 
beets as they come to our tables, floating in vinegar. 

The “honey bearing reed,” which was sugar cane, was 
brought from the Far East. It flourished in the Canary 
Islands. When the West Indies were discovered all the 
European countries tried to get territory there on which 
to grow sugar. They all got the habit of using it. 

Then, during his wars, Napoleon was cut off from the 
West and ran out of sugar for his army and his people. 
176 


COAXING THE SUGAR BEET 

He sets his scientists at work trying to make sugar from 
some other plant. They hit on the beet. 

From that time the cultivation of beets as a source of 
sugar steadily increased in Europe. To make this easy 
there was need of bigger and sweeter beets. For a hun¬ 
dred years the farmers of Europe have steadily bred up 
the beet, until those used for sugar-making have come to 
be of a surprising size. 

The fact that the beet plant stores sugar in its root is 
an excellent proof that these plants make sugar. It has 
been shown that green leaves in the sunshine are sugar 
factories. They take carbon from the carbon dioxide of 
the air, and sugar is chiefly carbon and water. So the 
green leaves turn this carbon and water into sugar, which 
the beet stores in its roots, and man finds a way to take 
it out and turn it into the white crystals which we use on 
our cereal at breakfast. 


177 


LXXXIX 


CELERY IS A BUILT-UP PLANT 

I SN’T IT ODD that man can take advantage of the 
natural peculiarities of plants, develop those unusual 
qualities, and profit hugely by doing so! 

There is celery, for instance. It is a built-up plant. 
Its roots are of little importance. Its leaves do not 
flaunt themselves very proudly. It has almost no stalk 
at all. The bulk of the plant as we know it is made up 
of none of the elements that are usually considered im¬ 
portant. That part of the celery plant that in most other 
vegetables is quite insignificant, the mere leaf stems, has 
been so greatly developed that it has become almost the 
whole plant. 

The celery plant was not always what it is today. It 
is, in fact, a member of the parsley family and a cousin 
to the carrot. It began by having leaf stems that were 
larger than the others of its kind, and man began to eat 
them. He started planting celery in his garden and 
breeding it always for larger and more tender leaf stems. 
Rhubarb is another plant that has been treated in a simi¬ 
lar way. It, too, had a big leaf stem. It is not a relative 
to celery, however, as it is a member of the buckwheat 
family, but it has been developed by man along similar 
lines. 

Man cultivated celery in home gardens for centuries, 
all the time developing the leaf stems. He did not awake 
to the fact that it could be grown and marketed on a 
178 


CELERY IS A BUILT-UP PLANT 

large scale until the present generation. Scientific truck 
growers near Boston and New York and then those in 
California, Florida, and the Lake states began to grow 
larger quantities of it. They found that it could be 
planted very thick in rows, that if the sun was kept away 
from the stems, they would be white, and that it could be 
crated and shipped thousands of miles. 

Thus was an industry developed, based on the odd 
tendency of one of the parsley plants to produce big stems 
for its leaves. It is no uncommon thing for an acre of 
celery to produce a crop that is worth four thousand dol¬ 
lars. The man who farms forty acres in celery has a big 
business on which it is possible to amass hundreds of 
thousands of dollars. Now celery rides all about the 
country in carload lots. There are huge cold storage 
warehouses here and there that are full of celery. In all 
the important markets of the nation celery is offered for 
sale. Most of the people of the nation eat it at least 
occasionally. And it all comes about from a fact that it 
is almost as strange as though a liking for pigs’ knuckles 
had shrunk other parts of pigs until nine-tenths of these 
animals were feet. 


179 


xc 


PLANTS THAT WIGWAG 

I SN’T IT ODD that certain plants act in so human a 
manner that they give the impression that they actu¬ 
ally can think! 

There are numbers of the bean group that act in this 
way. The ordinary clover, for example, is a member of 
the bean group, which means that it is a legume. When 
nightfall comes, it raises its three leaves and folds them 
into a nightcap which it wears until the sun comes out 
in the morning. 

The locust tree is a member of this bean family. Does 
it not bear a bean much like that which is eaten at din¬ 
ner time? The seed pod of the clover is not recognized 
as a bean until it is carefully examined. The leaf arrange¬ 
ment of the clover — one leaf at the tip of the stem and 
two opposite each other farther down — is the same in 
principle as that of the locust, which has many leaflets 
opposite each other. 

The acacia tree folds its locust-like leaves up tight at 
night. This sensitive plant is much like the locust in its 
leaf arrangement. The remarkable thing about it is its 
response to touch, in which action it stands in a class by 
itself. The leaf stem and the leaflets themselves may be 
standing erect in a normal position. Upon the slightest 
touch they immediately shrink and droop as though 
wilted. 

Another most remarkable member of this same family 
180 


PLANTS THAT WIGWAG 

is the telegraph plant of Asia. It has its largest leaf at 
the end of the stem and two lesser ones opposite each 
other lower down. These two lesser leaves go through 
strange movements not unlike those made by a sailor 
when he stands out in the rigging of his ship and wigwags 
a message to another ship. Each of these leaves takes one 
position, holds it a moment, takes another, and so on. It 
seems, however, that they are never quite sure that they 
have got their message through, since they keep at it 
without ceasing. 

The large leaf at the end of the stem of the telegraph 
plant goes to sleep at night and hangs down restfully. 
Not so these lesser leaves that are given to exercise. They 
keep on busily through the night as might the second 
hand of a watch ticking off the minutes and hours. The 
cause of this continued activity has long puzzled bota¬ 
nists, who have developed many theories but have failed 
to arrive at an agreement as to its purpose. 



181 





XCI 


LEAVES ARE TREE ASH CANS 

I SN’T IT ODD that the trees use the leaves they dis¬ 
card in the autumn as ash cans into which to dump 
their waste! 

The whole process of shredding its leaves is to the tree 
what fall house-cleaning is to us. 

The broad-leafed trees have found from experience that 
they must get rid of their leaves in winter, or the snow 
will break down their branches. They have learned how 
to form two rows of cork-like cells across the stems of their 
leaves that will break at just the right time and release 
them. 

Weeks in the autumn are taken up in getting ready 
for this parting. If the leaf it to be thrown away, the 
tree first takes everything of value out of it. The green 
of the leaf, for example, is a very important substance. 
It is the green that breaks up the sun’s rays and uses the 
power that it gets from them in taking carbon out of the 
air. The wood of the tree is made from this carbon. 

The tree wants to save this green. It changes it into a 
liquid that it may draw back into the tree and be stored 
up. That liquid is yellow. It has much to do with the 
leaves turning yellow in the autumn. 

There is a great deal of other material in the leaf that 
the tree may want to use in the spring. This is drawn 
out and stored. If you examine a leaf that has fallen 
naturally in the autumn you will find it to be little more 
182 


LEAVES ARE TREE ASH CANS 

than a shadow. All its vital parts have been pumped out 
before it was dropped. 

But the tree has done more than this. It has found 
that, during its summer housekeeping, certain materials 
have got in for which it had no use. During those 
months, if it is a big tree, it has been pumping up one 
hundred gallons of water a day from the roots and letting 
it evaporate from the leaves. This is a part of its process 
of manufacturing plant food. 

In this water there have been small particles of mineral 
substances that it has not been able to use. There is 
likely to be a good deal of lime in the tree that it does not 
want. There may also be a good deal of iron, or iron 
oxide. This is rust. It is also the substance which red¬ 
dens soil. 

The tree rushes these waste materials into the leaves 
it is about to drop. It dusts itself out and puts the waste 
into those leaf ash cans that are ready for the dump. 
Strangely, these waste products have a good deal to do 
with the color of autumn leaves. The red of them is due 
somewhat to the dryness or wetness of the season. Dry 
weather in the autumn produces brilliant foliage, and wet 
weather spoils it. In damp climates like that of England 
autumn is clothed in dull colors. 


183 


XCII 


OAKS LIKE TO BE DIFFERENT 

I SN’T IT ODD that brothers in the plant world have 
tastes as different as those of human brothers and in¬ 
sist on living very different sorts of lives! 

There are the oaks, for example, all marked by the 
acorn as being of the same family. Its members choose 
widely varying careers. The California live oak is by 
instinct a mountaineer, while the swamp oak of the East 
takes to the lowlands. 

This mountain live oak seems quite possessed with the 
idea of climbing toward the skies. It positively refuses 
to live anywhere except high up on mountain sides. It 
will sometimes come as low down as the two-thousand- 
foot line above the sea, but never lower. From there it 
climbs steadily until it gets to nine thousand feet. Up 
there conditions are so cold and unpromising that it can¬ 
not get along very well, but it clings to the mountain side. 
Life is so hard for it that it is no longer a tree but a mere 
shrub a foot high. Despite this fact, year after year it 
produces the acorns that prove it to be an oak. 

The swamp oak grows in low countries with its feet in 
the water. It may reach one hundred feet in height, but 
its arms are likely to be well supplied with bends and 
elbows. It is knotty and gnarled and looks as though it 
were drawing up its arms to show its muscles. And it is 
strong beyond conception. In the woods it grows tall in 
reaching up for the sunlight. Its mountain brother, on 
184 


OAKS LIKE TO BE DIFFERENT 

the other hand, may be fifty feet tall and have a spread of 
one hundred feet. This difference in height and breadth, 
again, seems a matter of temperament. 

The scarlet oak, which makes a redder blaze in the au¬ 
tumn woods than any other, has slender, graceful limbs 
as contrasted with those angular, crooked, grotesque 
branches of the aged swamp oak. Black Jack, on the con¬ 
trary, can hardly be styled a tree at all but a riot of 
brush that believes its duty is to overrun otherwise barren 
spaces. 

The burr oak, which in itself is a shaggy and lusty tree, 
specializes on growing large-sized acorns, two^thirds of 
whose surface it covers with a mossy cup fringed with 
burrs. The pin oak, a stately tree, often planted in city 
streets, produces a tiny acorn in a hard little cup that 
seems to grasp only the heel of it. The live oak keeps its 
leaves green all winter. The post oak lets them die but 
holds them, brown and drear as they are, through the 
winter and until the new leaves crowd them off. So 
varied in complexion are these tree brothers that they 
are currently known as white oaks, black oaks, scarlet 
oaks, red oaks, and yellow oaks. Trees, it would seem, 
tire of being and acting alike, just as people do. 


185 


XCIII 


TREE ROOTS ARE WATER-HUNTERS 

I SN’T IT ODD that trees have other selves that they 
hide under the ground and these other selves are often 
as marvelous as the tops that they flaunt to the skies! 

Some trees have tap roots that go straight down into 
the ground for distances as great as the length of their 
trunks above ground. The tap root of an oak is of this 
sort. These trees feed far under the ground. The water 
and the mineral salts that they need are drawn from 
great depths. 

Other varieties of trees follow a different program. 
They send their roots out on all sides but not down to 
any great depth. They get their food from near the 
surface. The pine is a good example of a tree that does 
this. 

When oak trees have grown on a piece of land for a 
long time, they may have exhausted the soil at the greater 
depths at which they feed. If they were cut down and 
pines were planted, an entirely different food supply near 
the surface would be used and the pines might do well. 
Where pines have exhausted the surface soil, oaks, on the 
other hand, might be planted and might thrive. 

It is the business of roots to go water-hunting. A tree, 
for example, might stand ten feet from the edge of a pond. 
Its roots would develop to much greater size and length 
on the pond side than on the other side. 

Out in the desert country the mesquite tree grows. 
186 


TREE ROOTS ARE WATER-HUNTERS 

Its roots have a hard task to find water. They often 
grow great distances underground in search of it. They 
have been known to reach out for sixty feet toward a 
meager water supply. The Mexicans sometimes study 
these mesquite roots and the directions they are taking 
in search of water before they decide where they shall 
sink their wells. 

The business of the big roots near the base of the trees 
is largely to hold the tree in place. Anchoring a great 
tree with a leafy top thrown to the winds is no mean task. 
It is the root hairs, which are near the tips of the bigger 
ones, that suck up the water and the salts that the plant 
wants. When a root actually reaches a pond or a stream, 
it develops an entirely different kind of feeders known as 
water roots. They are smooth, whitish cords that drink 
freely through their skins. 

Root hairs can even absorb parts of rocks when their 
trees need, as food, the materials of which they are made. 
Seeds planted in sand laid on tile will go down to the 
latter and spread out upon it. If the tile is of food value 
to the tree, the roots will etch themselves into it and thus 
take their own pictures* They have absorbed part of the 
tile in doing so. 


187 


xciv 


THE CACTUS HOUSES WOODPECKERS 

I SN'T IT ODD that the 
sahuaro, giant cactus of the 
Southwest, is, upon occasion, 
converted into a skyscraper 
apartment that houses many 
queer, red-headed families of 
woodpeckers! 

There are few trees in the 
desert country that afford opportunity for the wood¬ 
pecker to make houses for his family. The sahuaro pre¬ 
sents a proper trunk for this house-building, barring the 
disadvantage of its rows of projecting thorns. The wood¬ 
pecker can, however, squeeze between these thorns and 
find a chance to ply his bill without great danger. Once 
he digs through the leathery skin which seals the plant 
air-tight, the going is easier even than it is in the soft 
fiber of the cottonwood tree along the streams. All that 
he encounters, in fact, is a damp, pithy substance that 
might almost be scooped out with a spoon. This is the 
chamber in which the sahuaro stores up water for the long 
stretches between rains. 

And right here a very peculiar thing happens. When 
the woodpecker digs out his cave to just the size he wants 
it, he finds it damp, like a basement below the water 
level, and quite unfit as a place in which to raise a fam¬ 
ily. This is bad from the standpoint of the sahuaro also, 
188 







THE CACTUS HOUSES WOODPECKERS 

because it wastes some of its precious water supply. So 
the sahuaro sets about stopping the leak. It deposits a 
thick, woody substance all around the wound and seals it 
as tightly as its outer walls. These walls become as hard 
as an oak knot. 

The Indians often cut into the sahuaros and take out 
the woodpecker nests which have been thus water¬ 
proofed. They cut away the soft material that surrounds 
them and use what is left as dippers or food containers. 

When the sahuaro dies, its pithy insides soon go to 
pieces. The ribs which give it form are harder and sur¬ 
vive longer. But these pockets that have been formed 
where the plant has patched a wound made by the wood¬ 
pecker last longest of all. For decades, about the base of 
what was once a sahuaro, one is likely to be able to pick 
up strange wooden pieces in the form of these hardened 
pockets. 

Alongside the Superstition Mountains, in Arizona, 
where the Apache trail winds from Roosevelt Reservoir 
to Phoenix, on the hillsides about Castle Creek Hot 
Springs, studding the broken mesas about old San Xavier 
Mission near Tucson, the stately sahuaro offers its fluted 
column to the woodpecker. Often a dozen pairs of these 
sprightly birds will arrange their homes in true cliff- 
dweller style in a single trunk. The woodpecker insists 
on a fresh apartment every season, and its old quarters 
pass on to the pigmy owl, which is not so particular. 
These two members of the feathered tribe here live to¬ 
gether in harmony and contribute variety to the solitudes 
of great open spaces. 


189 


xcv 


BANANAS ARE NEWCOMERS 

I SN’T IT ODD that bananas, so common today, were 
quite unknown to our grandfathers! 

Bananas, in fact, did not enter much into trade until 
the beginning of the present century. They are grown in 
the tropics and have long been a popular food there. 
They will not grow where there is frost and so cannot be 
raised anywhere in the United States or in Europe ex¬ 
cept in the southern parts. To be used farther north, 
they must be shipped. This means that they must be 
handled in a hurry. With any fresh fruit it is a race to 
get it to market and get it used before it spoils. 

It is only in recent generations that ships have been 
fast enough and the plans for marketing have been well 
enough worked out for people in the temperate zones to 
be able to have bananas. 

Most people think that bananas grow wild in the 
tropics. It is true that banana plants grow wild but it is 
the cultivated banana plants that bear the best fruit. 
Fifty years ago people living in the tropics cultivated 
banana plants only for fruit for their own use. When it 
became possible to ship them north and sell great quan¬ 
tities of them, large plantations were developed. In Cen¬ 
tral America there are now so many plantations that a 
ship may be loaded with bananas every week in the year. 

The earliest record of banana farms comes from India. 
There were many of them along the foot of the Hima- 
190 


BANANAS ARE NEWCOMERS 

layas, the highest mountains in the world, two thousand 
years ago. The East Indians had learned how to make 
wild plants bear fruit if they did not do so without help. 

Banana cultivation spread into and across Africa. It 
had reached the Canary Islands, off the African coast, 
before America was discovered. No one knows whether 
or not banana plants were grown for their fruit in 
America before the time of Columbus. The general be¬ 
lief is that the idea of getting fruit from banana plants 
was brought to Santo Domingo by the Spaniards and 
from there spread all over tropical America. 

At the time of the Civil War few people in the United * 
States had ever seen a banana. It was twenty years later 
that an occasional schooner began bringing a cargo of 
them to New York or Boston. They were well received. 
Steamboats were then displacing sailing ships in trade 
to the South. They could make the trip up from the 
tropics in less time. 

It was in 1899 that a company was organized to de¬ 
velop banana plantations and ships that were specially 
built to handle their crops. These ships were refrigerated, 
to make the fruit keep better. The biggest banana plan¬ 
tations in the world grew up along the coast of Central 
America, where the soil and rainfall were just what was 
needed. Now huge shiploads of them come north every 
week. The fruit is shipped all over the country in re¬ 
frigerator cars. So it happens that nearly always a bunch 
of bananas hangs on a hook in every fruit store in the 
country. 


191 


INDEX 


Acacia, 180 
Acorn, 40-41, 184-185 
Air drainage, 114-115 
Alfalfa, 166-167 
Algae, 62 

Animals, as seed carriers, 10-11, 
94r-95 
Ant, 14 

Apple, member of rose family, 8-9 
Apple tree, outside grower, 70; 
goes crazy in South, 92-93; ori¬ 
gin of, 156-157 
Aroids, 172 

Bamboo, 12-13 

Bananas, grow from shoots, 22-23; 
inside growers, 70-71; ripening 
of, 88-89; red, 89; newcomers, 
190-191 

Barberries, 82-83 

Bean, origin of, 36; velvet, 37; soy, 
138-139; cheese from, 138-139; 
a legume, 166 

Bee, fertilizes: flowers, 10; morn¬ 
ing glory, 14; trees, 63; daisies, 
142-143 

Beet, likeness to turnip, 57; sugar 
from, 149, 176-177 
Birds, as seed carriers, 22 
Blackberry, 8-9 
Boll weevil, 5 
Brussels sprouts, 54-55 
Buds, as understudies, 26-27; on 
elms, 42; as fire insurance, 104- 
105; in grafting, 134-135, 147 

Cabbage, 54-55 

Cactus, as water barrel, 32-33, 60; 
help to desert traveler, 33; has 
green skin, 74 
Canna, 23, 70 
Cantaloupe, 18 


Carbon, 16-17 

Carbon dioxide, food for plants, 
16-17; robs persimmons of their 
pucker, 151 
Carrot, 57 
Cat-tails, 62 
Cauliflower, 55 
Cedar, 84-85 
Celery, 178-179 
Century plant, 75 
Cereus, night-blooming, 15 
Chaparral, 52-53 
Cheese, from beans, 139 
Cherry, member of rose family, 8-9 
Cherry tree, for shade, 136-137 
Cholla, 100-101 

Chrysanthemum, member of sun¬ 
flower family, 38; development 
and feeding of, 130-131 
Citrange, 171 
Citrangequat, 171 
Climate, in orchards, 114-115 
Clover, 180 
Cocoanut, 94-95 
Cone-bearers, 62-63 
Copra, 95 
Coral scale, 76 

Corn, member of grass family, 12; 
fertilization of, 108-109; origin 
of, 168-169 
Cornflower, 66 

Cotton, once a tree, 4-5; member 
of mallow family, 164; cloth, 
164-165 

Cottonwood, 90 
Cucumber, 18 
Cypress, 84-85 

Dahlia, 38 

Daisy, member of sunflower fam¬ 
ily, 38; fertilization of, 142-143; 
brought from Europe by man, 
161 


193 


INDEX 


Dandelion, member of sunflower 
family, 38; the lion’s tooth, 106- 
107 

Dasheen, 172-173 
Date, home and cultivation of, 58- 
59, 94-95; male and female, 102- 
103 

Dewberry, 8-9 
Dwarf trees, 146-147 

Earth stars, 77 
Elf-cups, 76 
Elms, 42-43 
Evergreens, 84-85 

Eerns, 62 

Fertilization, of grass, 13; of morn¬ 
ing glory, 14; of oak, 41; of pine, 
63; of date, 102-103; of corn, 
108-109; of daisy, 142-143 
Figs, 59 
Fir, 84^85 
Friar’s cowl, 76 

Fungi, agents of decay, 76-77; 
shunned by man, 86-87; spores 
of, 116-117; make no sugar, 118— 
119; prey on plants and animals, 
152-153 

Garlic, 50, 57 
Goldenrod, 38, 66 
Goosefoot family, 57 
Gourd family, 18-19 
Grafting, of grapes, 80-81; of 
peaches and other fruits, 98-99; 
of lazy trees, 134-135; of dwarf 
trees, 147 

Grape, North American, 30-31; 

European, 80-81 
Grapefruit, 48-49 
Grapevine, largest in world, 30 
Grass, inside grower, 70 
Grasses, giant, 12-13 
Greasewood, 61 


Hevea, rubber tree, 21 
Hyacinth, 50 

Insects, enemies of cotton, 5; ene¬ 
mies of grapes, 31, 80; destroyed 
by parasites, 153; spread by 
man, 160-161 

Juniper, 84r-85 

Knot holes, 144-145 
Kumquat, 171 

Lakes, effect of on climate, 115 
Leaves, as sugar factories, 16—17; 
beginning of twigs, 26-27; for 
wig-wagging, 180-181; as tree 
ash cans, 182-183 
Lettuce, member of sunflower 
family, 66; cultivation of, 67 
Lily family, 50-51; 96-97, 155 
Locust, 180 

Mango tree, 79 
Maple tree, 90, 158-159 
Mold, 76-77, 152 

Morning glory, fertilization of, 14- 
15; cousin to sweet potato, 122- 
123 

Mushroom, member of fungus 
family, 76; poisonous, 87; spores 
of, 116-117; lives upon other 
plants, 118-119 
Mustard family, 54, 57 

Nightshade family, 2-3 
Nitrogen, 166-167 
Nuts, 124-125 

Oak, 46-47, 154; produces cork, 
128, 129 

Oak family, members of, 40-41, 
184-185 
Ocotillo, 74 

Onion, member of lily family, 50- 
51; likeness to turnip, 57 


194 


INDEX 


Orange, seedless, origin of, 34-35; 
Japanese, 170-171 

Palm, date, 58-59, 94-95, 102-103; 

cocoanut, 94-95 
Palo-verde, 61, 74 
Parasites, 153 
Parsley family, 57 
Peach, member of rose family, 8- 
9; grafting of, 98-99 
Peanut, 112-113 

Pear, member of rose family, 8-9 
Persimmon, 150-151 
Phylloxera, 31, 80 
Pine, age and fertilization of, 63; 
fighter of winter storms, 84-85; 
outside grower, 154 
Plum, 8 

Poison, ivy, oak, sumac, 78, 120; 

varnish, 79; of rattlesnake, 120 
Poison ivy, cure for, 121 
Pollen, 10, 13, 14, 41, 63, 102-103, 
108-109, 142-143 
Polygala, fringed, 113 
Potassium permanganate, 120-121 
Potato, has poisonous relatives, 2- 
3; how grown, 22; sweet, 122- 
123 

Prickly pear, 100, 162-163 
Puffballs, 77 

Pumpkin, member of gourd family, 
18; earth’s biggest fruit, 44-45 

Quince, 8 

Radish, 57 
Raspberry, 8-9 
Rhubarb, 178 
Rice, 12 

Roots, as pumps, 28-29, 186-187 

Rose family, 8-9 

Rose of Jericho, 110-111 

Rubber, 20-21 

Rubber tree, 64-65, 72, 73 

Rue family, 49 


Rust, black stem, 82-83; apple, 
162 

Sahuaro, growth of, 60-61; has 
turned leaves into thorns, 74; 
houses woodpeckers, 188-189 
Salt, poisons trees and vegetables, 
6-7 

Seeds, carried by wind, 10; carried 
by animals, 11; with wings, 90- 
91, 106-107, 164 
Smoke bush, 79 
“Sow bread,” 113 
Spore, of wheat rust, 82-83; of 
other fungi, 116-117 
Spruce, 84-85 
Squash, 18 

Squirrels, as seed planters, 22, 46- 
47, 124-125 

Starch, likeness to sugar, 24-25 
Stumps, Douglas fir, 132-133 
Sugar, elements of, 16; made by 
leaves, 16-17; food for plants, 
24-25; origin of, 148; made from 
beets, 149, 176-177; made from 
maples, 159 

Sugar cane, member of grass fam¬ 
ily, 12; how grown, 22; origin 
of, 148 

Sunflower family, 38-39 
Sunflower, origin of, 174-175 

Telegraph plant, 181 
Thistle, member of sunflower 
family, 39, 66; Canada, 140- 
141 

Thorns, act as leaves, 74, 75 
Tobacco, 2 
Tomato, 2-3, 175 
Trees: apple, 70, 92-93; 156— 

157; cedar, 84-85; cherry, 136- 
137; cocoanut, 94-95; cone¬ 
bearing, 62-63; cotton, 4-5, 164— 
165; cottonwood, 90; cypress, 
84—85; date, 58-59, 94-95, 102- 


195 


INDEX 


103; Douglas fir, 132-133; dwarf, 
146-147; elm, 42-43; evergreen, 
84-85; fig, 59; fir, 84-85; hevea, 
21; Japanese orange, 170-171; 
juniper, 84-85; locust, 180; 
mango, 79; maple, 90, 158-159; 
nut, 124-125; oak, 40-41, 46-47, 
154, 184-185; orange, 34-35; 
palm, 58-59, 70, 94-95, 102-103, 
154-155; peach, 98-99; pine, 62- 
63, 84-85, 154; rubber, 64^65, 72; 
spruce, 84-85; willow, 90 
Trees, poisoning of, 6-7; roots 
of, 28-29, 186-187; in city, 46; 
grafting of, 98-99, 134-135, 146- 
147; carry fire insurance, 104- 
105; heal wounds, 144-145 
Trifoliate orange, 170-171 
Tulip, 50 



Turnip, 56-57 
Twigs, 26 

Watermelon, member of gourd 
family, 18; native of Africa, 126, 
127 

Wax berry, a poison sign, 78 
Weeds, spread by man, 160-161 
Wheat, member of grass family, 
12, 68; origin and growth of, 68- 
69; rust, 82-83 
Willow, 90 

Winds, carry seeds, 10, 43, 90-91, 
106, 164; fertilize grass, 13; fer¬ 
tilize pines, 63; carry wheat rust, 
82-83; fertilize dates, 102-103 
Woodpecker, 188-189 

Yucca, 96-97, 155 


196 




























































































